This week I thought I would juxtapose one poem I wrote in my mid-twenties with one I wrote in my mid-fifties. . . and let them have a thirty-year conversation.
EQUINOX
“I wear my passion like an open grave.
Unmistakeable
Dangerous
Deep
dark
Indifferent to the changes in the weather
In the season
It remains
On the rim of each horizon
As inevitable as the sunrise
Or the pounding surf
On a foggy grey sand
Wet day beach.
This is my passion
Harsh and overwhelming
One misstep and
I am lost
To the rush
The madness
As the walls shake
Until they split
The ice floe cracks
And warmth from deep within
This age old rock formation
Tumbles
Cascades
A small green tip emerges
Sign of new life.”
INTO THE BLUE
“Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in.”
“My brother
My mother
My father
and I
We hear the same
Mind
We beat one
Heart
Insatiable
Elastic
Expansive
Expanding
Always making room for more
Needing wanting
More
Greedy
Some might call it.
Greedy
for knowledge
for images
for ideas
for connections
Greedy
for Love.
But I
have been
a hoarder.
My life has been
a constant taking in.
Now
Full to overflowing
threatening to flood
my own banks
stockpiled intellectual flotsam
accrued emotional jetsam
canned and jarred detritus
against a rainy day
that finally has come.
I have been a hoarder.
A teacher.
A speaker.
A lover.
A giver.
All these too.
But of the things that matter most
Truths I have always known
Melodies that have bid me dance
Lyrics to songs of the centuries
Images painted in caves
Words that have sung to my soul
My storehouse is nearly full.
I can no longer see the walls.
Maybe there aren’t any now.
But I can’t see that either.
Accumulation
my mother’s spiritual teacher told me
Accumulation
killed my mother.
I have finally relinquished
the last remnants of her.
Peeled off encrustations.
Carapaces shed.
I have set myself free
in so many ways
Except
the one
that matters
most.
Behind my barricaded heart
my bombsheltered mind
Hunkered down in the trenches of my fear
Exchanging volleys of blanks with my own soul
I shiver in the damp and deafening silence
Echoes of the words never spoken
Ringing in my ears.
The smoke clears
The fog lifts
I see what has been there all along.
Blue.
The color of the space
between where we are
and where we long to be.
Caustic blue
that eats at our skin
even as it calls our souls
Fugitive blue
That disappears
the moment it sees the light
To true
this blue
Is to risk
The Conversation
we all came here to have
And
it
is
finally
time.
To lift the floodgates
Let go at last
All that to which we have so tightly held
Before
It drowns us
To wave the white flag
Ceasing to be
A prisoner in a war within
And walk out of the camp
that never had any gates.
Release.
Surrender.
And then step
free at last
into the Blue
of the distant wild yonder
of the imminent now
that is the instertital in between
of the liminal edges
fading in the light
This is why we came.
To speak
To love
To live
To be
Blue.”