Cooling
When you are hot blooded
And wanting to the burn the night,
Love brings the flood.
–
Warming
When you are chilled
And lonely and dark,
Love brings you inside of itself.
The Nectar
Already by 10 AM the sun is merciless
But the birds are twittering
Under the shade of leaves,
Cool in the undergrowth.
Sounds arrive in the garden
Brought by a breeze:
Cars swishing in the distance,
Workers on scaffolding
Laying tiles,
A child cries out
After its mother:
Just everyday happenings
Of a suburb in a town in the summer.
As I sit, hearing the world,
Brought the waft of honeysuckle
And jasmine flowers
Generous and comforting,
I realise
That I am here
And I am now,
And that life is perfect
As the buddlier flowers’
Drooping purple spires
On which the bees drink thirstily,
And butterflies flit,
Their tongues unfurled
Tasting the world,
Sipping at the nectar of it.
The Fluid Of The Air
There were downpours last night,
The patter of swollen drops
On leaves and the absorbent earth.
The guttering dripped intermittently
And sung me back to sleep.
This morning, when I step outside,
The garden accepts me
Inside itself,
Merges me wholly
With the rain-heavy air,
Easy on the breath
And dampening like a sodden blanket.
Bird calls are shrill in the moistness
As if the lubricated air
Conveyed sound more easily.
The separation between things
Is altered and healed
As though my senses,
Conducted by the closeness of molecules,
Reach far beyond
What I might call the body.
Where once there was dry air, the sky,
And things existing in it,
Now there is one fluid medium
Where all things touch.
The boundaries of bark and stem,
Feathered skin or the insects chitinous
Exoskeleton are as porous
As the canopy of the overarching tree.
And the osmosis between
Is a luxuriant movement,
Energy’s transient enquiry,
Unconcerned by the names of things
And free to pass between,
Free to roam
A borderless and singular being.
Equality Of Being
We fret
For the things in the world:
How many,
Which ones we should get,
Their value,
How they make us look and feel
As if
Our arbitrary
Systems and scales
Were in fact
Real
And not at all made up.
–
What we forget
Is the equality of seeing,
How each
Has an equal
Eye upon the world,
An equal stake in being.
The vagrant on the street
Is no less
Than the champagne oligarch:
The poor man Is
As the rich man Is;
They are one
In the space of seeing
Where being rises
Fresh to the crisp now.
–
And so,
Out our minds go
To squabble for resources,
Ever waring
Over the importance
Of tiny little pretty things,
While the fact of our being
And our seeing
And the one who sees
Is sunk under mounds of stuff
That once attained
Lose their sheen and their gleam,
Dulling in the ignorance
Of our self
To our self.
Cool Breeze Beneath The Plane Trees
London is sweet
In June’s ownership.
Roses billow
From front gardens
In to quite, shady streets.
There is a cool breeze
Beneath the plane trees,
And reality flexes
With a deep breath
And a mind expanding.
I read in the paper
That rare orchids had materialised
On a green roof
Among towering edifices –
An astronomical improbable chance!
Someone was quoted saying it was miraculous.
It made me wonder
What other miracles
Are yet in store,
Idling just off stage,
Unseen in the formless realm,
Unexpressed possibility
Awaiting only
A nod of our head
And an invitation to be.
While The Sun Set
While the sun set
Our thoughts got caught
In the sticky thorns
Of the news
And we all remarked
On how terrible it was.
–
And as the sky became redder
And wider and filled
With darting bugs,
Feasting bats upon the wing,
We said it was a travesty.
–
And when the moon,
A slither in the vastness
Of horizons broad as beginnings,
Slipped from behind an effortless cloud,
We continued with our worrying stories.
–
And at last, with but a pale glimmer
At the most western face of the day,
The final moment
When night was not yet night
And day still held sway,
We woke up,
Realised everything was alright
And that life was in fact joyous.
Heaven
We walk in heaven
Barefoot on the grass
Drinking dew-cool breaths
Or we dance on the burning pavement,
Our thoughts like shards of glass
Cutting us deeply.
Yet still we are heavenly set
Upon the earth,
Our gentle or angry mother,
Goddess or foe,
Living our lives in grace
And the freedom to choose
To make this world
A heaven or a hell.
Borders or Being
In our thoughts
There are borders,
Endless frictions
And contrary points of view
Fermenting grievances
And ideological wars:
All sides stubbornly gripping
Their high-minded-rightness,
Where ideals are more important
Than the tender heart’s
Love-laced and conciliatory say.
–
While in the heart’s being
There is only oneness.
Your Heart is Love
Your heart is love,
Both the loved
And the one who loves,
Both transmitter
And receiver too,
A whole organ
Resonating
At the frequency
Of the universe
In whose word
It speaks
And hears
At the same time,
It is the great
And the small I am
Beating as one.
If
If friendship is more than merely
The sharing of ideas,
More than agreement,
More than a likeness of thought,
Then,
Am I,
Like you,
In our being
Friend to all upon the earth?
