A New Poem…
Does Anyone know anymore about this thing called poetry? This thing where you write stanzas of rhyme without logic or reason? Seems to be a relic of the ancient past, but for some reason I keep resuscitating it, trying to coax it back to life. Here’s the latest…
The Great Open Meadow
(A poem of rebirth, by DPS)
I noticed, one day, that I had been trying to hold up the world.
I took on the guilt and shame,
The sadness
of the all people I knew,
Of the dispossessed,
The marginalized, the forgotten,
The grief stricken,
the drunks,
The ones who kept leaving themselves in the dust,
And everyone else.
But my scrawny feet, my bent frame, legs of tiny sticks..
They could not hold the weight.
They were not designed to take on such unbearable gravity.
There are so many beings in this world that cry out in the night.
I wanted so badly to free them from the pain.
And to taste that freedom for myself.
But when I tried, it seemed I often created even more pain,
More gravity to hold up
for the world.
And all of this, because I sometimes forget,
that I am not what I think…
That I am an animal, an insect.
You may think that I’m joking, but I’m not.
I was born, here, in the great open meadow.
This place I call home is a scatter of
life in various forms,
A potential of movement and sound that is quite unique…
The only one in the whole galaxy like it.
My purpose here…to walk along the razor thin edge of the leaf,
to take the essence from it.
To burrow deep into the mud
and come out again with fresh eyes,
To witness the afternoon sun shine through giant droplets of rain.
To hear the mockingbirds perform their exquisite symphonies
For the deer and the dandelions.
To feel the cold Northern winds as they sweep
Through tall, sturdy oaks and greyed aspens.
My body was designed to eat, and to die.
I am near-sighted,
but my sense of touch is
raw and uncanny.
I inch methodically along thinly barked branches
that line the open meadow.
My pace is gentle, unencumbered,
Even more leisurely than that of the three-toed sloth.
My greatest achievement is not in this life,
But in my so-called death –
My metamorphosis
into something now unseen.
I will, for now, live an ordinary existence,
and go unnoticed by most.
And I am happy as I am,
Following the flow of things,
The momentary tasks that fall before me.
What I can tell you, in truth, is this:
There is nothing at all like the vastness of this moment.
In it, there is no material gain or loss.
There is no lack, no worry.
There is no struggle for survival,
No shame, no fear.
No union or separation,
No sense of I – a separate self.
In it, all human philosophies appear absurd,
All beliefs grow withered and old.
All ideas, remnants of something distant and obsolete.
In it, I am still.
Immovable.
Un-conceived.
Unbound.
Absorbed in the beatific and immaterial
essence of all things.
Like a butterfly, unborn, yet fully awakened,
Swaddled inside its dark cocoon,
Pausing
To feel the bud of life for the first time again,
To witness the magnificence of
Its newly formed wings.
Wings that will no doubt carry it to stellar heights.
– for a moment…
and then graciously, without hesitation,
Descend, and vanish into the quiet morning fog
Of the great open meadow.
A similar post to The Great Open Meadow, by DP Smith:
