roots

May 23, 2023

THE BLEEDING EDGE

We are lovers of novelty, we want
all that is new or clinging
to what we imagine are our roots.
It has long been this way,
you need only look at the map.
Hampshire, York, Jersey, and
for that matter Brunswick and Mexico.
We crave innovation, we always
want to be on the cutting edge, forgetting
that all too soon it will become
the bleeding edge, and we will curse
its failures, its shortcomings.
So ask yourself if those who live
in Hampshire, York, Jersey, and
Brunswick, Scotia, and Mexico
think they live in a place that is
no longer new, left behind in
an endless search for something
other than what we have right now.

February 17, 2023

SAINTS AND SINNERS

I am a distant grandchild
of saints and Herod,
kings and lords, and
Visigoths for good measure.

That half of me is
woven of ever thinner
branches on a tree
that threatens to topple
from the lightness
of its other side, roots
deep in the rich soil
of Lithuania, the roots
hitting bedrock, and
the branches stunted
and there a simple
Ashkenazi Jew.

November 14, 2020

NAMASTE

There was a time, still within
memory’s ever more tenuous grasp
that I imagined myself, at this age,
as a monk in a Buddhist temple
in Kyoto, that I had assumed a silence
imposed by lack of language, not faith.

I am certain that the Japanese
are pleased that I let that dream
pass unfulfilled, that I confine
my practice to that American form
of Zen, softened and gently bleached
from its shogun watered roots.

I recall my visits to Senso-ji, Todaii-ji
and countless other small temples
where I would often find a zafu and sit,
but only the youngest monks I met
could understand that it was there,
among them, that I felt spiritually at home.

September 30, 2020

GROUNDED

it was so much easier when I could still
imagine myself a bird, untethered
and free to take flight on a whim.

In dreams I often flew, no Icarus
but a raptor, peering down, seeing
with a clarity the earth denied me.

Now my roots have taken hold
in the enmeshing soil plunged deep
and spread tendrils anchoring me,

and even thought of flight has been
buried deeply in memory, and I am
like others of my species, left

to maneuver through my life knowing
that true freedom is waiting, but
above and always now out of reach.