Why Poetry?

 

Because this is a world I didn’t make, and it is real,
and the realer it feels, the more mysterious;

because one day, walking with my dad on a willow-lined trail
toward Good Spirit Lake, I was lifted out of the boy into a swirling world
of joy, and I’ve yet to fathom a why;

because reason is too weak to raise what is dead;

to honour the life of a sparrow;

to attend the spell of a dead star, whose light we still see;

to throw a wrench into a world geared up for business;

to feel,
down to the bone,
the quantum foam,
we flail in;

to convince you of your own divinity;

to oppose injustice and hate in a way that excludes no one;
not even the hater;

because over the years, I’ve fallen in love with a monk,
quite a few teachers, and a dead philosopher;

because I’m angry, envious, resentful, and fearful,
and still, there’s all this love in me;

because there’s a language within language always waiting—
like a silent cry;

because our glossary of mockery needs a funeral,
and the lexicon that’s left, needs new anointing.

because, in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God, and how else do you plumb that?

to let failure, discouragement, suffering and death, have their say,
without any spoon of bromide;

to thicken compassion and thin out aggression;

because there’s an old notion called vision, that religion,
under natural sunlight, might be cause for unification;

meaning: Love spells the end of religion;

to find a way to say, welcome your existential dread,
for it drives the search for Spirit;

because the most primitive (and abusive) form of comprehension
is literalism, and dear Lord, see how we’re slipping back!

to un-mire the mind, liberate the kidneys, and activate
the open hand;

because faith,
without resisting moneychangers in corporate temples,
is dead;

because poetry is political, and kindness is its administrative wing;

because, hatred into compassion, revenge into forgiveness—
eclipse all other miracles;

to find a thousand ways to say we are not our true selves,
until we sit, and eat, together;

because perennial amazement needs constant oxygen;

because in the time that’s left I want to tattoo the implications of Christ
on the ‘full body suit’ of my heart;

meaning: look around, the boundaries are gone, everything points to unity—
and we must hurry to catch the new reality—
the original, incarnate, emergent, reality;

for in the end, if joy has a why, it is harmony.