A lovely Easter gift this morning find my poem published in Monk magazine ('Monk: Art and the Soul') a British journal both online and in print, sold at the Tate Gallery in London and other fine book stores. It is a magazine devoted to art and spirituality that I highly recommend. The online version, of course, is free. It's really an Imbolc poem, but since it still feels like February on Easter, and we all rise to eternal life out of loam and compost, it's still relevant.
February in the bardo, wayless Between,
More solid surely than beginning
or arrival, when thaw and peristalsis
squeeze me out of myself,
pass me like a burning stone
from dark to dark, spore to spore,
the gift of one electron to the next,
a discontinuous thread of quantum shifts,
a shrug of the indifferent vacuum.
Somehow bidden upward by a dumb
invisible glow, through troughs and
hollows of loam, where the only hope
is Presence, I hear the unstruck chimes
of Imbolc ringing in their seeds,
taste the licorice roots of pure attention,
sip sparkling streams of emptiness
between frog croaks, scent star-spume
of the void in a coyote howl.
This could be the hour I meet You
in solitude, Bodhichitta stillness
of the black hole, whorl
of dahlia blossoms in a withered bulb,
silken wisps of Andromeda listening
to itself, coiled in serpentine Otherness.
How many Dharma talks must I attend
before I discover this galactic silence
rippling between my thoughts?
Let your constellations bend over me
and kiss my forehead with
unfathomably intimate distances.
Let a sparrow sing in the season
after the dream, just before waking
when the diamond that never sleeps
is born. Call it my Heart.
This poem was just published in the British
magazine, 'Monk: Art and the Soul.'
magazine, 'Monk: Art and the Soul.'
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