Category: Poetry

Afghanistan

Sometimes they say the dharma is not pretty
which means that one day you will know
maybe many lives from now
that lock and load is not the road
to our survival.

As the long-overdue departure from Afghanistan approaches, here’s something I wrote 16 years ago upon the loss of 2000 American soldiers there:

The ones who cannot stand to weep

are the ones who say that I must keep

my mouth shut when I penetrate their spin

while they bring comfort to the enemy within.

They say a citizen must ignore the bureaucratic fuel of war

the official juggernaut of Right exercised under cover of night

twisted to their purpose

out of sight.

I have to wonder how they hide as the storm of conflict roils inside

that must be silenced lest the voices bare

their fantasies of greed and fear so empty of the urge to free

themselves for any nobler purpose than extinction.

 

I am not your enemy I say I am your mirror with this scarred half of me

the missing leg below my knee the plates inside my skull

I’m not quite here and yet aware with halting gait and forever stare

searching for my lost parts anywhere I can find them.

I look into a stranger’s eyes and ask if I am known.

He asks if I am somehow lost and then my cover’s blown.

I try to tell him of the cost that makes me but a rumor now

of the man that has been lost.

 

The past will not leave me be and the future can’t come too soon.

The doctors say that I’m all right that I can live a normal life

but they can’t see what I have seen and cannot see me now.

 

Rockets blast my dreams each night and a python tightens

round my chest robbing me of sober rest.

A life digested. Sweet sleep if I can get some.

 

I’m sorry to disturb you from your reverie but a soldier’s bleeding in the streets.

He is my brother or your son or a sister loved by everyone.

They are my nation fallen.

 

Each day’s supply of coffins flown in silence to some distant home

When you close your eyes at night you never see the fading light 

of lives undone. They come from Idaho or Montana from Texas and Looze-iana

their dreams pumped with your sad fiction

the vice of economic conscription.

How many more will have to fly before the chaff of falsehood

separates from the truth that made them.

 

Sister Cindy Sheehan tore through your carpet of rhetorical bombs

broke through the frosted glass of pious platitudes echoing through

the mighty marbled bunkers of government

Her fighting vehicle was not made by Bradley her ammunition not in

short supply her simple question pierced the armor of official aplomb.

Why?

 

From that day more eyes were peeled to see your naked lies revealed

A million more converted to the truth that cannot be diverted.

You can take the nation into your storm of oedipal complaint

without reason or restraint but you cannot hide

from Jesus on your shoulder. And now no matter where you turn

sound bites.

 

Sometimes they say the dharma is not pretty

which means that one day you will know

maybe many lives from now

that lock and load is not the road

to our survival.

Stray Thoughts

Here by the water the only constant
is the wind, the waves behave as if they
couldn’t be bothered to make themselves known

against the rock. A fellow nearby looks intently
at The Gate while his beloved sits in silence,
chin in hand, waiting for the answer that should come

to her at any moment. This bench is dedicated to the
public service of a city councilman, who from this spot
shall look upon the Bay forever, contemplating the

shifting nature of the world he left behind.
This is the day I will record the argot of the shaman
preparing his evening magic by a low fire,

a squirrel rising up from a rocky windbreak,
the clatter of small drums,
the snap of kite tails and unintelligible

harmonies celebrating sunshine. Ballooned yachts
criss-cross the horizon, white sails whipping halyards
taut — a flock of gulls straddling the updrafts–

white wings, distant whitecaps, a white cotton
candy sky, a white dog passing,
the white socks of the walkers,

the white lace gown you wore last night,
the bed a Rohrschach in white.
The Buddha never shifts his gaze.

Gratitude

Gratitude, I am your listening post,
perched on the shoulders of mountains,
in the grasses, in your granite faces,
reclining in the long valleys of your body.
.
Send me your chariots, your champion angels,
warriors of the spirit, whose love rises in speech,
in gesture, in wordless looks,
bathed in sublime rose waters;
even in anguish for the suffering of others.

Send me your thoroughbreds, heavy with bridle;
I will race alongside you, breathing my thanksgiving
for the idealism of youth, for the wild and holy power
of the earnest novitiate;

for conversations between fathers, mothers,
sons and daughters, blooming in the
rising cumulus of purity and courage, in
the altitudes of high regard, the vitality of innocence,
the awakening of inquiry.

Let me travel beside you,
raining down with the pounding hooves
of your galloping love.

 

No Time To Lose

Reading Andrew Harvey’s 1994 book, The Way of Passion, about Rumi’s relationship with his teacher Shams i-Tabriz is a riveting and enlightening dive into the poetry Rumi produced from that time.

Reading Andrew Harvey’s 1994 book, The Way of Passion, about Rumi’s relationship with his teacher Shams i-Tabriz, is a riveting and enlightening dive into the poetry Rumi produced from that time. Why would I read this? Because devoted to my Buddhist niche as I may be, it’s dry in comparison to the ecstatic and explosively awakened passion of Sufism. Continue reading “No Time To Lose”

This Time

In this time of Covid, economic upheaval, the climate monster bearing down on us, unrest and uncertainty, many are suffering. And many, both citizens and entire foreign nations, are watching in horror as American democracy is dismantled by the madman, abetted by his entire party. Joanna Macy’s spiral approach to being present in this world (gratitude, honoring our pain for the world, seeing with new eyes and going forth) is not merely playing out in our imaginations or in private retreats or zoom gatherings. There’s no such abstraction here. It’s playing out in real time, every day as we struggle to grasp the pace of change, how to stay grounded and engaged and not overwhelmed by circumstances beyond our control.

The pace of change draws us more deeply into the present moment. The past evaporates like volatile liquid exposed to the atmosphere. The future is ever more uncertain. We are left awash in the feelings and sensations of the immediate moment. And that immediacy demands a response. On one hand we can dwell on loss. And there are many reasons to do so because so much is being lost—or at least suspended. Lives are being lost, biodiversity is being lost, polar ice, human trust. The rule of law and the social contract are under attack.

Rilke says it best in one of Joanna’s favorite sonnets:

Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29

We are losing our resolve to address the advancing disaster of climate change. We are seeing our political agency being undermined and incrementally destroyed. We are seeing dissent being suppressed combined with the promotion of outrageously bizarre versions of truth. All the trappings of fascism are building into a wave that threatens to sweep away all we hold dear. Every day I am drawn into that loss, perhaps only for moments; but at least daily, at

times even hourly. I descend into agony, beating back and forth from grief to passion, from annihilation to liberation, each fueling the other. Maybe it was Martin Prechtel who said, ‘grief is the womb of art,’ or maybe it was me, I’m not sure. Every day is a transition, swinging from brief regeneration in the soil of grief, being tenderized and motivated to go forth once more with new eyes, an awakened and softened heart, being able to listen and feel what is right on the surface in moments of rededicating myself to possibility.

….but when I lean over the chasm of myself,
it seems my god is dark
and like a web: a hundred roots silently drinking.

This is the ferment I grow out of.
More I don’t know because my branches

rest in deep silence,
stirred only by the wind.

–Rilke

The creative moment is right in front of me. I have left behind all urgency. I am operating in a different time where urgency no longer exists. And I have all the time I need. To make haste is to be driven by a fantasy that may never appear. The fullness of this time is what some Buddhists call the bardo of everyday life, a time of embodying life and death in equal measure, living your dying in every moment, embracing life and being open to the awakening potential of each.

Widening Circles

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

If I could choose, I would be that great song, written while standing in the eye of the storm we are living through right now.

 

My Lineage

My lineage is the vast space of Longchenpa,
the precision of Jigme Lingpa, the tickster
Patrul Rinpoche and heart of Dilgo Kyentse.

My lineage is the perpetual union of all opposites,
the devotional music wafting through the
thick silence of a Rishikesh dawn.

My lineage is Durga the Invincible,
Kali, the Dancer of Destruction,
Parvati, the messenger of Love and Devotion.

My lineage is the lost language of the Algonquin,
the Mohican and the Miwok. It is the shining eyes
of a Lisu girl, the radiant gaze of a stranger
at the Maha Bodhi temple.

My lineage is the woolen robes collapsed like
ghosts on the benches of Shugsep nunnery,
the mountain peasants standing in line to
enter Samye monastery.

My lineage is tears of surrender on the cheeks
of pilgrims, whirling prayer wheels and wooden floors
worn by the prostrations of the devoted.

My lineage is the half-blind old woman greeting
me at the doorway of Gangri Tokar,
love beyond measure emanating from
a single ancient eye

My lineage is the morning mists of Gangtok,
the sanctuaries of Bagan, the lanterns hung
by the river at Hoi An.

My lineage is the master calligraphers of ancient Islam,
the Wailing Wall, the cathedral at Reims.

My lineage is the whales singing their
song across a thousand miles of ocean,
never singing an oldie, always a new song.

My lineage is slipping into the deep chill of the Yuba River,
diving the blue-green depths of Lake Tahoe,
climbing the trails of Devil’s Postpile
and the cliffs of Kalalau.

My lineage is egrets dive-bombing for frogs in the
rice paddies of Bali, a glistening web
hanging in a redwood forest, the wetlands, the badlands,
the white birch, the alpine, the Douglas fir
and the mighty sequoia.

My lineage is Rilke’s falcon, circling in a great storm,
the heart of Joanna Macy, the ecstatic passion
of Andrew Harvey, the mythic stories of Michael Meade
and the linguistic jail-break of Bayo Akomolafe,
voices of longing, resilience, illumination,
messiness and trouble; koans of entanglement.

My lineage is the relentlessly curious, the rule-breakers,
the sense makers, the light revealers,
travelers of the transverse, sentinels of the timeless,
fugitives of rationality, non-doers in a world of doing,
outlaws, burning and bursting through
the crumbling walls of every Jericho.

This Creaking Wagon

These bones are now but drying dates
shriveling in the sun. In the morning, they
squabble with each other like ravenous lovers.

Yet they are not strangers in my house, uninvited.
Nor are they pack animals, hard on the scent
of death. They still crave the lamp of midnight

stories sweetened with the truth of young wine.
They are still vessels of honey, pouring slowly
their devotions to the last breath.

I used to wake as a baker ready to feed a
village.  Now I rise at dawn as fallen fruit, ripened in
dreams. This creaking wagon, the blessed bounty

of life, one morning shall rise to see the doors gone,
the windows thrown open and the sun shining
through the hole in this roof.

Listen For The Beloved

Listen for the Beloved.
The walls fall down.
Listen for the Beloved.
The Stories wither to dust.

Listen for the Beloved.
The crockery dances in the cupboards.
Listen for the Beloved.
The masters obey their animals.

Empty your pockets.
You do not live in a tiny tent,
solitary in your pea pod warmth
by a dwindling fire.

No, your tent is the sky.
And that lump in your throat
is not gold.
Neither is it coal.
It is not even yours.

Set free the herd
chained to your doorstep.
Set free the millers,
chained to their wheels.

There is water aplenty
overflowing the cup
of the Beloved.
Drink by her soul hand.

Hellbender Salamander

Tell me again how we all came from the same place.
Where you are here, opening your palm to the shaking

wriggle of worm-force, the blackness, the
soul-less gravity of imperatives watching

your unfolding, the light, the distance overcome
in the waters, the tides, the blood of time,

your age, the warp of your witness,
shadows unfurling into light, your orbit,

your center of iron, blatant divisions that must be
crossed before you can express the inexpressible.

this is love unwound. this is love before it knows itself.
this is love becoming itself, time deciding what is and is not.

this is love casting its shadow upon the deep.
twisting out of its cocoon, bursting through the soil, the night.

Cold

My shivering spends the last energy I have
to forage a cup of hot chocolate.
Then again, there is the cover on the couch—
the blanket I left rumpled last night in my
desperation for comfort.
I am now lost between purpose,
time and timelessness.

This cold. It comes in waves.
Like the ebb and flow of glaciers,
swinging through the seasons of loss and gain
And yet, each year a little more is lost.

When we speak of acres of ice it means nothing.
When we speak of islands the size of Manhattan
or the state of Connecticut

then my shivering becomes the main event.
There is no solace anymore.
No island in these tropics of denial.
No longer any blast furnace that can warm me.

The arc of my life descends, the edges
fraying now like an old sweater.
I drop to my knees in a non-aggression
pact with the glaciers, to let myself flow with
the continents of ice, the eons of frozen awe.

Elsewhere, the lives of the natural world
still unfold without remorse, without reflection,
shedding no blood for the past.
The integrity. The harmony of the present

brings me to my senses.
The savannah will be my home
–in the next life–
where I will hunt or graze,
water or preen, live or die
with nothing more to say.

 
©gary horvitz, 2017