12/15/12, a poem

Been thinking of you, all of you, and of the distance

that may be between us as the old year closes,

the new looms so close, thinking of the strange ways we

now pass our thoughts, the slow scratch and fold that served

so well for so long, almost completely supplanted

by these soft and immediate clickings.

Soft too is the color of the green here this time

of year. A break in the rains let me to the hills,

as I haven’t been for awhile, new grasses

pushing to the surface, looking to cover the slopes

in silent, steady waves, from bottom to top.

Coyote bush, a coastal, hill country shrub, common

from here into the Sierra, blossoms in December

and January, small, frost-white petals, bursting

to seeds spread across the dampened earth in minute

snow flakes. Red Christmas berries bunch in native toyon,

young hummingbird sage sprouts along the trail, soap plant

on it. And the blue-grey leaves of new sage, fragrant

and tender to touch.

I say their names out loud, these few I know. The season’s

so short, this seems important. The streams, silent in summer,

sing too; their tongues knowing all there is to know of this place,

their Bodhisattva voices carry every name,

forgetting not even one.

Higher in the hills, I begin to recall the carnage.

It might be the middle-east, could be the invisible

Philippines or some unknown African country,

but it’s Connecticut this time, teachers and children,

targets so common these days, almost anywhere

we might name.

With a President as thoughtful as our own,

I am saddened when he touts our military might

as a towering accomplishment, and more so

as he stands today, helpless in the face of our children

killing our children. As real as outside threats may be,

it’s a cancer on the inside that torments us—all of our might

cannot make this right.

Something different need be done.

The News will chew and bite, encourage us

to swallow, as they diligently search more feed.

But what matter the motive, when the method

is readily given; what matter the method

when the solution is imbedded

in society’s psyche

as viable.

Broken bodies litter non-combat zones across the globe,

school yards just one. How many names, how many the lives

as brief as interludes, snapped shut—we are not different

in this, and any indifference marks complicity. This

is not the heritage I wish to protect—it is this

that needs breaking.

Whether ensconced in constitutions or lodged, abstract,

in folk-laws, this cancer will have its way with us

and within the lives of those we influence, unless

we learn to call it what it is, aloud: ours, it is ours.

But sickness rides the same currents that healing does,

and in time all resistance can be recognized

as temporary. With this, and only with this,

comes the light that allows for creative change.

Just as winter is one word, but not a single experience,

our work needs to be in the deeper recesses

of the violence in our own hearts. There, and in sharing

as open and authentic as the working of streams,

we will find the way to the seeds

of violence’s opposites

and the beginnings

of a different way to be.

I am indebted to poet Sam Hamill, and his “Awakening in Buenos Aires,” which closes with the following:

“….to have come so far

to find again what I believe:

how things—slowly,

but inevitably—can change,

and how our hearts

and this world can, at last, be made.”