Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. Help someone's soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd. (Rumi)
I watch you.
So long that I forget about time.
So intently that I forget about space.
I watch you until I forget what you are called.
Eventually, I am no longer watching you.
A watcher is separate, and I have become
the suede of your petals,
the sinew of your stalk,
the sting of your thorn,
the essence of your fragrance,
the photosynthesis of your leaves.
For a moment longer than time and
smaller than a split atom
you and I are one.
It’s a timeless moment,
a sharp intake of knowing, a breath of awareness.
The final word comes, either heard or read,
and with it the resolution of a thought
which resonates at a tone too deep for humans to hear –
maybe heard only by sperm whales –
but which we can feel, and which we know rings
a truth truer than the truth known before.
My eyes linger at the white space
on the page after the final period –
Or I sit in the quiet after Garrison’s voice
falls away into broadcast silence.
I stay in that silence.
I stay for a timeless moment,
seven seconds of stunned silence,
in that place where poetry lives.
I love to see a field of thistle
from a distance. Get too close
and you will bleed. But someone
has to chop it down before it
goes to seed and spreads its drifting,
downy, dangerous self into a
field of corn or beans or maybe
where the cattle feed. It has not
many friends except the butterfies and
bees. And I am not one either except
I love to see it purple in a field, far
away, where it cannot make me bleed.
Sunday morning sipping tea.
Different from past Sundays.
No newspaper. No black and white movie on t.v.
No coffee (too acidic, causes arthritis, gums up your joints).
Now I sit at the kitchen table
still in my robe at noon
laptop computer wirelessly surfing the net
from one website to the oddly connected next
like a cyber version of six degrees of Kevin Bacon.
From the blood type diet to the blood type of Jesus
to a blog about Ernest Angley to a Wiccan site (for balance)
to a chakra site to Shirley MacLaine’s site
which talked about her new book
and had the first chapter online
which mentioned the connection of musical tones to colors
and how that is evidenced in the chakra system
which made me think . . .
Connection. Colors. Tones. Energy centers. Emotion.
So I wrote a poem about the color of anger.
Can’t you see I’m working?
Deb Moore 