PRESENCE

Credit:
cursusmindfulnessleiden.nl

 

Mindfulness and meditations on ‘Now’ inspired this poem:

                               

                                   P R E S E N C E

 

The moving finger of fact,

Field of focus,

The now of the piano key

As you hear the present melody,

The typewriter’s arm swinging in

To print this one word, 

The calm eye of the storm

at the centre

Of an uprooted beyond,

Like me today

The day after I have been,

The day before a vacuum

Of nothingness,

Like my thought

That turns so quickly

Into a scattered memory,

My will moving like a torch

In the absolute night of my mind

Surrounded by fading peripheries,

Ephemeral

Like the winking city lights

Seen from a satellite

As Gaia turns,

As the present of this Universe

Begins to expire

Ere it arises

Into its impermanence.

 

The rocks have memorized

The ages, as too the trunk of a tree

And we, precipitate of the past,

Our childhood,

Or a sky of long past stars

Registered in the firmament,

And genetic material’s amazing tenacity

And permanence, packaged with memories

Of how we should be,

All the living world that we see,

Archives full of minutest histories.

 

Shall we speak of the seed then

In the past tense 

Or is it in the present?

Is it our past then that has presence

and the present

But a pause

Between what we have been

And what we will be,

Propelled by cause

As the first moment

Of its effect, point of focus,

The past and the present

Just one presence

Igniting outwards to eternity ?

Credit:
smittenblog.com

BUTTERFLY

 

Not more than even a century can withstand

Your quite ordinary precious thoughts –

Even the paper browns

In less than a decade in your hand,

What more we, you, I, outlast,

Than Christ’s Christmas grows

With imperfect repetition,

Meteoring out at last in ten thousand years ?

And that baby’s dear pink cheek

Is feebler still;

For in time’s hydraulic press

Like a fossil out of context

It remains

Chewed out to the bone;

So go fairy ego

Butterfly away

Into the impermanent sun.