1.
There are times when life can culminate
in a quarter mile of country road: dark
before dawn, a heavy fog, and you, blind
to the breathing bodies galloping near,
suddenly, here, as you pedal your bike,
narrow tires on crushed gravel,
gliding downhill toward town, toward dawn,
your face wet with dew
and filled with the sound of slender hooves,
a herd of lithe ungulates in the mist,
and you, a child of God, a child of Gaia, adopted,
one of them, undiluted joy rushing right through you.
2.
Are we not human? Does our flesh not respond to a caress?
Do our souls not open in moments radiant, prismatic, sublime?
Are we not moved by mercy and kindness?
Does not Gaza choke and numb us?
How can I write of love, of surrender, of joy,
under the global shadow of people being torn open
by hate and missiles?
And while the genocide drags on, always worse;
the soul, despite that poem by Jack Gilbert,*
dwindles to a gnat.
They—the wardens of poetic scholarship—say Denise’s poetry
suffered lyrically when she began writing politically.
Seven books and three incarcerations later, and finally,
the end of the Vietnam war, How, asks Ms. Levertov,
does one evade total involvement in life?
3.
It has to do with love.
Somehow, this feeling, more than a feeling,
an outlook, a be-ing, that is utterly self-forgetting,
brazenly inclusive, roguishly accepting of people and place,
position and circumstance, recklessly open to scene and sound,
time and hope, courageously embracing loss and grief,
willingly patient of pain and death, this more-than-a-feeling,
this original love that invades your morning
like a sudden sun shooting through a stand of elm,
your ultimate surrender to life. Your no-way-out calling.
*A Brief for the Defense
Potent as usual Stephen, well perhaps more potent this morning. Thank-you for the light and the dark, love and hate and daring to bring attention to the insanity of genocide occurring as we go about our lives.
Thank you so much, Kirk.
Lovely. Evolution and compassion in motion.
Thank you, Dennis. I appreciate that!
Thank you for these glimpses into the simultaneous possibilities and impossibilities of be-ing and for touching the heartbreaking horrors and beauties of the world at once.
Deep gratitude to you, Adela. And lovely to hear from you again.
Your last stanza, Stephen, gives me a vision to pray and to hope for. I wish I were that way and I’m not. And I don’t know how to be. But, perhaps Love will break into my being like that sudden sunlight breaking through the elm (what a powerfully visual phrase!) and do the work for me that I can’t seem to do for myself. There is still hope!
Thank you for this.
Thank you, Ann, I, too, write in hope of becoming.
This captures something magically beautiful and achingly rare
“a be-ing, that is utterly self-forgetting,
brazenly inclusive, roguishly accepting of people and place,
position and circumstance, recklessly open to scene and sound,
time and hope, courageously embracing loss and grief,
willingly patient of pain and death”
Thank you, Ananda. Is it too much to wish this might be our human evolution?