Catechism

Who did you come from?

The grandmother of every grandmother before you
A little fish learning to walk
The salty mud of a forgotten shore

What were the first words that filled you?

The first gasp of air
Before you knew what words were
The awe that you inspired upon your arrival

What are you made of?

The flame of an ancient star
Realizing its own emergence
Eternally shifting shape

Who is your oldest beginning?

Someone between the stone and water
Who would be the mother of every thing
That emerged after her

01 December 2019

Evocation of Tiktaalik

imagine the awe i felt
between stone and water
the things you and i have emerged from

when i first felt the sun
younger back then
warm the broad span of my nose

the nose that took in my first
breath of marshy air
followed by another, and many more

perhaps i am not the first
but how wondrous to feel the breeze
on my damp cheek
in the tender dawn of the world

01 December 2019

The Shimmering World

How great the world is
Its elasticity boundless, ineffable
So much greater than the winter before us
So much greater than our expectation
Of when winter will end.

How the world shimmers
At the edges of our field of vision
Rushing out far beyond our line of sight
On voyages we will never comprehend
But how great this revelation is
To see both near at hand and
From this, to imagine the unimaginable.

18 October 2020

I wrote this as a meditation on an excerpt of Etel Adnan's poem "Surge"

When The World Says Nothing

Be still as the world is
not even waiting for a longer day,
an outer fire

Let this silence comfort you
while you grow without knowing it
while you rest without wanting it

While the green dreams of past and future slumber on
while the coiled potential of root and branches
rests not in the potential, but in the now

The boring, restless, fidgety now
the slowed breath, the fire turned inward
an ember banked in the cool hearth.

The Now still deserving to be loved
even when the world says nothing.

29 November 2020

I wrote this as a meditation on Thomas Merton's poem "Love Winter When The Plant Says Nothing," in The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1977), 353