Around and around we spin,
Revealed at the instant
Of our isolation
Within the deep black night.
All our little lights flicker, echoes
Of color already slipping
Into an infinite depth of shadow;
The flame and cry
Of our brief life
A mere nanosecond anomaly
Already disappearing
Within the dead black globe of night.
The water is swift, yet gentle,
Flowing from the source
Of the thought arising from a moment—
A thought which, though awaited,
Has taken me unaware,
Shifting my little barque
From the deadness of the shore
Into this current.
The river is clear and sparkling.
The air is wonderfully fresh
As if newly washed with rain.
I am borne quietly rocking
Toward a horizon not noticed before.
My journey’s end, far away yet,
Seems to shimmer with hope.
The sweetness of the promise there
Drifts back across the water.
I breathe in its fragrance
And feed my waiting heart.
Then, with the gracefulness
Of a child slipping into sleep,
The vision melts down the sky into night.
The water beneath my small crafts stills.
I hear only the small, gentle slapping
Of the water against the side of my boat,
And my own breath stirring in the balmy air.
The sky is filled with stars—
Each sheer point of light a reminder,
A memory of the sweetness of hope
At the edge of the horizon—
Floating here, I am at peace and dreaming
Of an unexpected moment
Lighting up the edge of day.
The vision offered to the waiting heart.
On these streets I am a stranger
An interloper
A slight tang of awareness
Rippling across an ordinary day.
Perhaps because I am not intimate
With the history of these streets
My ears are vulnerable,
to their stories:
The babble, the songs
The wailing, the screams
A sigh, a whisper
Each reaches out to me
Wraps its insubstantial fingers
Around my throat
Till the shape of words
Erupts in my mind,
Without instrument or voice
melodies
Sway and weave about my feet
Till it is dancing shoes I wear
As I perform all alone here
On these unfamiliar streets
The people I pass are illusory
Disconnected images
Emerging out of the unknown
Then melting away
beyond the knowable
I wander these streets
As if in a dream
Thought flowing into thought
Not bound by logic’s limits
The morning is reluctant
To leave off dreaming
And I have been caught
Within the surreality
Of its waking
Far from home
We students wrote
To our families.
The others sent word:
Mother, there’s a foreigner
I’ve met…
And the answer came:
Sorry, not at this time.
When I wrote about
My foreign friend,
My answer was
“Of course, bring your friend.”
The others wrote again:
Father, my friend
Is of a different race…
In answer their fathers wrote:
Not here, my child,
Not now.
But when I wrote the same,
I was told, “Your friend is welcome
In our home.’
When the others wrote:
My friend is crippled, Dad…
Sorry, we can’t deal
With that here
My dad replied,
“We’ll manage somehow.
Tell us what is needed.”
The others wrote once more
My friend, Mother, does not
Share our beliefs, but…
Their mothers responded,
My son, what would we say
To one another? Sorry, no.
My family wrote:
“Perhaps your friend is wiser than we.
The door is open, a room prepared.
Bring your friend and hurry home.
We are waiting. Love from all of us.”
I chose to write
In an alien voice
To speak out
To explain the why
I forced myself
To travel roads
Unknown to me
To hear the howls
Of broken destiny
It is all spilled
Now upon inked pages
That pain, the twisted limbs
Of history that maimed
Lie bleeding across pages
Charred by words burning holes
Leaving me here
Horribly bruised
Stranded where I sought
To be—
No-man’s land—
Waiting to learn of peace
Holding my white flag
Of surrender
It was protest in a time of protests. It was a song of joy sung by dreamers in a time of dreamers in search of joy. It was a record of reality: rainbow illusions becoming khaki and guns. It was already a memory of a promise lost in the yesterdays of misbegotten heroes, children without parents, and charlatans.
Yet, they sang—the players and the audience in the theater—at the final moment as if the dream was not already lost but alive and theirs to hold that night.
I joined in the song, my tears falling for all the lost hopes, as together we all sang and sang again: “Let the sun shine, let the sun shine…”
High grass blowing
Smell of the breathing earth
After the rain
Wind, rock, sky
Surging forward
Impelled to the next season
This Halloween will be different.
There will be no Jack O’ Lanterns,
No Trick-Or-Treaters welcomed either
In this sacred space
Where I scrub and scrub
Till everywhere and everything
Shimmers beneath the red aura
Of a setting sun.
And yet I continue scouring
Until I drop exhausted
To the bare floor
While the surfaces softly glow
As moonlight spreads its beams.
Witches. ghosts, goblins
And other night creatures
May ride the skies till dawn,
But I will be unaware—
Deep in sleep as though cursed
Like fabled Sleeping Beauty.
When I wake, I will walk to the sea
To let the brine sharp air
Sweep away the last ash-dust
Of betrayal,
And standing in the receding waves
Let their distanced coolness
Seep within to douse even the embers
Of betrayal’s fires of treachery.
At last, I will lie in the sun
While the rushing waters within
Carve away the lingering footprints
Of betrayal
Creating new pathways
Until there is only an emptiness
As vast as the Grand Canyon.
Infilled with peace
Then warmed within and without,
I will rise to walk in serenity
And confidence
To a new beginning,
A new tomorrow.
Weak
Bleak
Product of listlessness
The dregs of photosynthesis
Drab
Flat
A fitting complement
For khaki and beige
Leeched of vibrancy
Olive is barely
A color at all
Born as it was
Where the wind blows brown
Though rain may paint the air
In lands
Where the sun and angry earth
Chew rock into soil
There once was a little girl in whose laugh the bluebird sang while the sun shined in her smile. Yet, when the gas line broke killing the young elm tree, when explorer ants were smashed so the picnic was safe, when a snail curled in upon itself when for a game some salt was poured onto its path, when the bright-brave freesias faded to straw without protest—then, without a sound, the little girl cried.
And no one knew except her stuffed gray bunny who understood the silent language the heart knows that human ears almost never hear—the sound a star makes splintering light upon the night as if alive although in fact it died a million years ago.
Just so, in the apricot dawns when fairy tears sprinkled the lawns, as the little girl ran laughing with her arms outspread to gather all the goodness in, the people heard the bluebird sing. And they smiled, the deep inside, precious gift smile.
For no one saw the shadow of goodbye in the eyes of the little girl as she ran to catch each fleeting joy before it whispered away, because like the glow of a lost star, the brilliance of her once-child joy still lit the shadows of their days.