Tag: contemplative poetry

Uncut

Before the word, the light stood whole—
no edge to catch it, no angle
to prove it was there at all.

Then the word came, a shadow
thrown backward across the light,
trying to give an edge to what
threw no shadow of its own.

This is the failure built into naming:
the stone is cut so it can shine,
and cutting is a kind of loss—
a wound the light forgives
by entering it anyway.

So the word is not the thing.
It is the facet, not the fire.

Hold it still and it goes dark;
turn it, and for one breath
it remembers what it came from.

That breath is the poem.
Not the gem. The glimmer.

The Cusan Sky

When color fails and sepia ascends,
it is not a lesser kingdom taking the throne—
it is the throne admitting
it was always borrowed light.

Blue steps down first,
humblest of the courtiers,
having pretended sky long enough.
Then green,
then every noon-loud hue,
filing out like a court dismissed
from a kingdom never theirs.

What ascends is not a color at all
but the confession beneath color—
the brown of old earth,
old paper,
old bone,
the ground from which all colors briefly rose,
waiting
the way silence waits
under every word
that thought itself necessary.

This is not dusk.
Dusk still bargains with the sun.
This is the sky
relinquishing every borrowed name,
becoming itself
by what it is no longer—

not red,
not gold,
not the day you expected,
but the day before adjectives.

Return

evening crawls toward its end
heavy head leans to hand

eyelids closed tight
as mind drifts toward sleep

brief review of day
contemplation of what is to come

then silence
quiet
return

The Dervish and the Wave

Swirling waves, dervish-like in their intent,
divining direction beneath the moon,
the water neither wandering nor sent
but turning, as all turning things must turn
toward some still point the motion can’t explain —
the eye of every gyre a kind of prayer,
where salt forgets itself, freed of its name,
becomes the simple fact of moving: here,
and here, and here. The moon gives no reply.
She keeps her cold and distant office, draws
the deep in rhythms older than the sky
and older still than any naming laws.
So let the dervish and the wave agree:
to spin is not to search — it is to be.

Return to Morning

Hairs in the damndest places—
Sticking out of ears and nostrils,
Sprouting on shoulders too.
Yet suddenly sparse
Upon the summit
Where once the forest stood.

The trees that remain
Fade in color,
yet glisten pure and bright,
Catching light,
the darker growth once swallowed.

The forest thins.
The dome beneath
Opens to sky—
as if return to morning,
the bare crown
lifted toward first light.