NO MIND
Seek the serenity
Where serendipity survives
Where all is stillness
And creativity lives
No mind
Read Li Po and Du Fu
To find the effortless
State where concepts
Do not cling
No mind
Find a mind emptied
Of the muffled roar
Or life’s brickworks
And white noise
No mind
ASPENS
All felled, felled, all are felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not
spared, not one
(“Binsey Poplars” – Gerald Manley
Hopkins)
Stand in a stand of Aspen trees,
Deciduous hardwoods,
White, black, and green,
Around you everywhere seen
From birth to death.
See how they sucker,
Shallow-rooted, spreading,
To occupy every clearing,
Dense, invasive, colonizing,
Standing together as one.
Resilient, adaptable,
Coming back quickly
From harvest or fire,
Recreating their tribe.
Look on their many skins –
Green in youth, then white,
Then black, furrowing
And wrinkling with age.
Look at their leaves,
Smallish, near-round, identical,
Wilting yellow in fall,
Falling from brittle limbs.
Think on their shallow life force,
Roots so close to the surface
Of their crowded world,
Extensive, but temporary.
The stand is cloned, each tree
A genetic replicate of its mates
They grow up together
To weaken and die together.
It is not known if they grieve,
Only that they are forced to leave
By mandated life span
That belies their potential
And brings their lives full circle.
BEASTS
We require our demons
to be beyond imagining,
mythical beasts born
of fears and fevers.
It has always been so.
We cloud our skies
with fierce dragons
and winged horses,
our darkest woods
with banshees and babayagas.
Leonids, griffins, manticores
lurk in our shadows.
Selkies and sirens beckon us
to the bottom of the sea.
Archetypes of antiquity;
kraken and roc,
medusa and minotaur,
cyclops and chimera.
Our children do not
know of such things.
We seed their dreams
with Bigfoot and Yeti,
Godzilla and Kong.
We cannot deny our need
for fearful fantasies.
These beasts resolve
our mysteries,
act as culprits
in our oldest coldest cases.
No comments:
Post a Comment