Skip to main content

Kevlar Vest

We grow famished with duty, hold a boney line.
Do the right thing. 
Say the right word.
Live the right moment.

Here we go, combing days for purpose, an army of sea urchins. 
Swooning for octopus, supple and keen this one – could we be that? 
Could we trellis darkness with ink trails like the one you climb now,
word by word?
Can duty sing beauty like catgut on wood?
Can it upholster days in both silk and sacking?
Make Tuesday a rich brocade.
Wednesday, corduroy,
Thursday, Friday, Saturday tatted Chantilly lace.
Sunday and Monday matted felt.
It’s a Gordian puzzle – and how did it happen?
A march for Maslow’s dream – our bruises the crown and scepter,
climbing, climbing and where would we be?
Not Avalon nor Shangri-La, not nirvana nor Eden,
crawling to another frontier – a fresh start.
Out of sticks and stones and mended bones, we light another fire.
And this Kevlar vest, we unbutton it – notion by stoic notion.
right view and intention
right speech and action and livelihood
right effort and mindfulness, even to distraction and
we stop marching -- for 
there is light leaking in,
a soul shine, see,
Kuan Yin,

she holds the mirror.

Comments

Tracy P. said…
Reading this reminds me of the Oliver poem I have in my bathroom: "Mysteries, Yes." She writes about how we "come from the delight or the scars of damage to the comfort of a poem." Thank you, Rosa, for reminding me to turn to a poem. This one fits the bill. I love you.
April 8, 2014 at 8:16 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Death Might Be Just A Holy Rend

  Death Might Be Just A Holy Rend And life a faithful pillow - a pillow to go flat, a spirit to drift off,  glaciers to melt and raise the sea. The blueprint is clear - Expect a tiny storm of mercy–  full of crows and bottle flies to debride the corpse,  to tithe the land.      And respect the putrid demise - things that fall apart make space for miracles.   Yet there persists the memory of breath rinsed in lavender and salt air. Then the dreams for blood and semen to revive, to metabolize  every tired, sad gospel into a hatch of octopus. Death confesses everything as she conjures her necrosis, as she feigns redemption, fools us with false devotion. She believes our defiance will set her free.   We must let grief to be the thread and needle to darn the rend, renew the cloth. then we can grasp the nascent green of winter wheat in spring.
Post a Comment
Read more

Covid Journal Entry 14

April 4, 2020 Today’s image – Exploring social cohorts. So, on campus now there is a small village of us living together, the remnants of those in residence this year.   We are an international population: seven from the US, six from Vietnam, five from China,   four from Morocco, one from the DR and two dogs/three cats.   We share four large buildings where we live, take our meals, study and exercise, on a five-acre campus. The rest of the two hundred and sixty or seventy odd community members are sheltering in their homes; some of the teachers and administrators dropping by during the week to work in their offices.   We have had little or no contact with them so far.   Our chef and his crew of two come in by rotation to prepare and serve the daily meals, a maintenance duo tend to the essential tasks and repairs, the city services haul away trash and recycling, the postal service, UPS and FedEx still deliver mail and packages.   It’s Iowa and the gove...
Post a Comment
Read more

Tongue

When I was ten, my dad pot-roasted a cow’s tongue. He brought it to the table on a platter, unsliced, open: a chaise lounge, red and velvet, slip of the lip to swallow us whole. The tongue is a door, a bed of confession, zipper to seal the deal. There is a jade plant on my window sill. Its many tongues sip silent molecules: water vapor, nitrogen, cool pool in the Kalahari. Tongue as cave, as conveyor, as flight of brown bats. Tongue holding space between us, gilded and strong with hope and death - a pocket for everything. Last night a snag of locust blew down over chicken wire. Five hens escaped. The snag, a tongue to freedom, to better pickings, a generous ledge. Sometimes a tongue wags, ungenerous, it keens to ten fingers times twenty dangling over a hand-hewn gunnel. There were children in that boat, fleeing with family over turquoise water. Maybe it was the Mediterranean or cold Aegean Sea - a wide tongue to crac...
Post a Comment
Read more