commit to the process
LIFE – the temptation is always to reduce it to size. A bowl of cherries. A rat race. Amino acids. Even to call it a mystery smacks of reductionism. It is the mystery.
As far as anybody seems to know, the vast majority of things in the universe do not have whatever life is. Sticks, stones, stars, space – they simply are. A few things are and are somehow alive to it. They have broken through into Someone, or Something has broken through into them. Even a jellyfish, a butternut squash. They’re in it with us. We’re all in it together, or it in us. Life is it. Life is with.
After lecturing learnedly on miracles, a great theologian was asked to give a specific example of one. “There is only one miracle,” he answered. “It is life.”
Have you wept at anything during the past year?
Has your heart beat faster at the sight of young beauty?
Have you thought seriously about the fact that someday you are going to die?
More often than not, do you really listen when people are speaking to you instead of just waiting for your turn to speak?
Is there anybody you know in whose place, if one of you had to suffer great pain, you would volunteer yourself?
If your answer to all or most of these questions is no, the chances are that you’re dead.
💃🏻
~ Frederick Buechner
originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words
maybe we should redefine the human body
this fleeting flash of existence
into something more manageable
possibly use an oracle from a lost tongue
or something children can grab
.
even the physical fact of your face
stubble of rough beard
its really an undiscovered haven of wilderness preserves
or some flashing blue temple of luminous fibers
.
you are a cloud capped tower
the souls fiery predilection
untamable fire
a great globe
a gorgeous palace
melting into thin air
.
this coat of you
garment of flesh and blood
a miracle of armor protecting us from dust and plague
a kaleidoscope moving at the speed of light
provoking an epiphany of star poems
.
law me down a border on the edge of this constellation
so I can escape an ejected primordial comet of revolutionary escapades
before too long let us each and all reclaim human regeneration
and so welcome the clean space to become perfected art
.
you –
this blinding flash of condensed atoms
breast arms and legs
turmoil totally unmanageable
welcome me into this new undefinable rouge ecstasy
like a galloping red bird of infinity
before the dark void swallows me whole
into a veritable contradiction of neo-forms
__________
Adam A. DeFranco
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1699576296948473/
I wonder if writing this poem
will spill you out of me
through my fingertips
will the ink become your blood
this paper your skin
for me to touch
again and again?
I wonder if stretching my hands to the sky,
while standing on my tiptoes
will release your wings
so you can fly free with me
into the starry sky
discovering all the worlds we have inside?
I wonder if I stand as tall, and as still, as a tree
you will come to me
climb up inside me
twist your arms and legs into my branches
hold me close and never let me go?
I wonder if I sing you a love song
if I will become a part your soul
and you part of mine
both of us sewn within these chords
of mine and yours
absorbing each other
into our very dna?
Will we become each other?
Forever becoming each other’s other?
mirrors of beauty
to dance inside the aleph
where heaven meets the earth?
I want to know…
🌳
AL
life: acoustic & amplified 