A poem from my chapbook The Moth Eaten World. Written in 2008, this poem seemed appropriate today after writing about Luck and Fortune. I realize how far I’ve come from this painful place, but I also recognize that writing this allowed me to keep moving spiritually to a more true place for myself. Please excuse the formatting, there shouldn’t be spaces between the couplet lines.
breathing
after Robert Hass
I left God in her Temple when you got sick.
Foolish to utter that name, like lassoing clouds
wandering an indigo arc.
I praise instead sunflowers’ beneficent heads
their Fibonacci faces divining light, sing hymns
of beans, corn and all dirt shrouded
tubers begging us bend
as we sow, witness the parlay of earth-
worms, their castings, our gold.
I rant prayers to righteous communities of bees,
their fierce loyalty spinning alchemies day and night.
On the wild shore, where the sea breaks its back,
between foam and spray I walk splintered
like an armless starfish, waiting: for the turn
of tide, a waxing breath, my place among
the minyan of slack-jawed facing slack water.