Newly minted air
Made new by the night
Holds spring
In its spaciousness.
The world is awake
And tender
As the first-born greens
Of beginnings
Brought forth
Again, and yet again
In timelessness.
Being dances
To the steadiness
Of the sun,
Lives as a prayer
To the becoming of the one
Who holds
The delicate flower
And weight of the earth
And else innumerable,
All secure
In boundless,
Infinite nothingness.
The garden is ripe with being
For sunlight
Diffuse through haze
Illuminates
And encourages
All green things
To be
Ever more themselves.
And like the plants
I expose my skin
And open my pores
And breath in
That light,
Absorb
The sweetness offered
Unconditionally,
And drink in life
Knowing, as it is mine
So it belongs to all
Whose hearts beat
And in whose veins sap rises,
And in even the static selves
Of soil and stones
And things thought inanimate,
Nevertheless
A pulse of being still thrills.
I walk barefoot
Upon your back
Breathing the fresh, clean air
Cleansed by the trees,
Their breath in mine
As mine is in theirs.
And my eyes gaze upon all your wonder,
My eyes which are yours,
My seeing which is your sight.
To think I once walked separate,
High in thought
And fear
And confusion,
Yet still my bare feet
Touched the ground,
And what the soil bore
I ate, digested, made into myself,
Unyieldingly gripping
The fiction of separation,
Believing illusion
Despite the proof of my body.
The wind is in me
And I am the wind.
I am the earth
Momentarily raised into flesh,
Borrowed from eternity.
I am the being and the seeing.
How could I have maintained
The belief that in all the universe,
Only we, as humans,
Dwell outside all that is?
We wear our race like a heavy cloak
Painting our skins with uncomfortable ideas.
We wear our gender like lead boots,
Stumbling in discomfort proclaimed as ease.
We wear our sexuality like a brightly
Coloured mask.
Our religion and politics
We wear as indomitable rightness.
Our point of view
Is an impenetrable stone castle
Fortified until the last soldier is killed.
Our countries are emblems
For which many will die.
So many are the dividing lines,
The fractious ideas,
For we are tribes
Of a broken mind,
Switching allegiances
Like a fickle tide forgetting the moon,
Changing our image to suit,
Gritting our teeth
In gripped identity
Held as a fist
Shaken at the world.
Are you for or against?
⁃ the what does not matter
In this politics of imagery.
Is it possible we are mistaken
In our hell-bent
Desperation to be somebody?
Could we be
Loose in all the periphery
Of our difference?
Could we see that we one in our being
And the rest is but a jumble of ideas
To wear, not for the war of it
But for the fun of it.
Where is even rightness in this?
Perhaps nowhere
But within the expanse of our boundless self
Containing nothing but the infinite.
In the wind chime caressed
By a breath,
And in that very same breeze
On which birds chirp and caw
And flute about the day,
And in the corrugated iron roof
Tink-tinking with a lungful
Of sunshine,
Expanding its sun-trap back
And stretching like a luxuriant cat,
And in the lofty Scots pine
Whose needling fronds
Reach like sensing fingertips
Deep into the infinite:
These all
Are the measure of happiness.
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