In the laws of awe,

The world still surrenders

To the beatitude of the whole.

Sometimes even the earth wants to stop to rest,

But expels itself and thrusts forward

Continuing on its destined voyage

Through space,

Through the continuum of time

To show us the sunrise in the morning,

After an uneasy night

And give us one more chance

To watch the bird in flight.

But, I wonder at what obstruction

Has pressurized her bowels

And pushes up against her plates

Shifting them,

Erupting old wounds

Like a teenagers face

Boiled and swollen from to much junk.

 

Taking hold of these things,

One can see

From the small to the infinite

How ignorantly we take care

Of that which we depend on.

And, looking at her from afar,

This earth is

The raped womb

Of a mother

That most men can’t look at

Who bear the shame

Of the moment when

With no outlet for their passions,

They lash out

Overcome from an insatiable hunger,

When greed overrides results,

Rather than to surrender to

Their loneliness, their fear

Of separateness,

As they notice their unbondedness

And panic before allowing

The unconscious knowledge

Of their own ignorance

To flow into them

And spare them extinction.

 

My tears now at the point

Where I was once told to leave them—

Trembling towards the ridge—

Where only the observant eye sees them.

These tears are not for the unconscious.

There upon that ridge they linger

And then simmer down again,

Waiting at this doorway

Rather than outpouring.

 

To support ignorance

Is to become a part of it

Is true,

But to turn your back

On someone

For the sake of love?

But, what can you do,

If that is the only route left to you,

When words can not be spoken,

When the only way

They will hear your love

Is to leave and walk away?

Start a war?

 

My hair cut short today.

My face full and open.

Its nakedness

Reveals my eyes, and you can see me.

I am happy with this face.

Behind the sadness, there is a light,

And this anger is not born

Of pettiness and greedy things.

It carries with it a wave of generations gone.

It carries with it death’s knowledge

In loves song.

 

Today I read once more,

We Americans have no roots

And I cried

At the callousness,

At the inhumanity behind those words.

We Americans who are we?

We are trees who learned to walk

Then rooted to this earth

From shore to shore.

There is a price paid

Always.

 

 

 

Traditions die hard

Frozen with fear,

Frozen with the incarcerated

Dreams broken

And barred in by boundaries

Between you and I,

Country and country.

War is a tradition on this planet.

Like the dead bodies after war,

This planet is soiled

With the wastes

Of new things

To create new needs.

This has become a tradition too.

This earth moves

In a tradition of gravity.

This plant planet

May soon decide

To break

Its traditions too.