A New Poem…
Does Anyone know anymore about this thing called poetry? This thing where you write stanzas of rhyme without reason? Seems to be a relic of the ancient past, but somehow I keep resuscitating it, coaxing 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 dispossessed,
the marginalized, the forgotten, the grief stricken,
the drunks, the ones who kept leaving themselves in the dust.
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,
for others.
And all of this, because I sometimes forget,
that I am an animal, an insect.
You 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 earth
and come out again
with fresh eyes,
To see the morning sun
shine
through giant droplets of rain.
My body was designed to eat, and then 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 great open meadow.
My gentle pace is even more leisurely than that of the three-toed sloth,
the slowest mammal on earth.
Yet my greatest achievement is not in this life,
but in my so-called death –
my transformation
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 are no distressed ones crying out.
No shame, no fear.
No union or separation.
In it, all philosophies become absurd,
all beliefs grow withered and old.
All ideas, remnants of something distant, insubstantial.
In it, I am still.
Immovable.
Un-conceived.
Absorbed in the essence of all things.
Like a newborn butterfly,
pausing for a moment inside its dark cocoon
to feel the bud of life for the first time again,
to witness the inherent 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:
