breakfast

10 Tuesday Sep 2019

Tags

2019, 7*, blindness, blogging, branches, breakfast, breathing, canopy, coffee, dark, echo, energy, eyes, flash, gooseberry, ground, growth, jam, leaves, life, light, living, monkey, path, reaching, reading, samsara, seeing, shadow, sound, sunlight, toast, trees, walking, way, wind, woodland

breakfast

these shadows on a long walk
through the woodland with only occasional sun

all there, underneath the undergrowth
cannot see the ground, the stems that grow from it

branches reach, leaves envelope everywhere
from nowhere; weave

and grow round and entwine each other;
if I lift the leaves to see my way forward –

searching for light, searching for life
to grow, to continue – and if I break the smaller branches to

make way
I will scratch my arms, sap will sting my skin, my

eyes, I cannot see, I cannot see;
and I won’t see; some trees

are quicker and older (than me)
they hold the path and reach wide,

and creepers make them fat
and vines hang like curtains of water;

the canopy above, maximised
to greatest energy, sent back down through rough wires;

only when the wind leans
or a monkey leaps, is there a flash of light, gone by the

time I’ve looked back down to the path
blinded, to see where I am

there must be so much light somewhere
out there, if only I weren’t stumbling around and bleeding

… really; I come downstairs
and breathe coffee and spiced home – made gooseberry jam on home – made toast

while reading my posts … yes,
a thousand hacks and sap in the dark

where I cannot see
and cannot know where I am

a thousand ‘choks’ deferred
the undergrowth too dense to echo

Bodhisattvacharyavatara chapter VI, verse 12: How can I attain happiness when the causes for happiness are obtained only through great effort and very rarely, and when the seeds of pain and sorrow are so prevalent, relentless and multifarious that they are realised easily and without any effort? And yet it is only from suffering that the thought and longing for escape and liberation from the suffering of conditioned existence will come about … therefore, O my deepest mind, hold yourself strong, patient, steadfast!

^{————w}(O)_{rmholes_________________________________|—–}

branches & breathing wormhole: blue sky high
coffee wormhole: green and / luminant / to behold
echo & path & walking wormhole: the Bodhisattva set out / for the Seat of Awakening
eyes & life wormhole: eyes like petals
leaves & living wormhole: everything is caused by something, which / something is caused by something else, nothing / stands alone where all pass as phantoms
light & trees wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – sooner; / and later
reading wormhole: {reading right to left}
samsara & sound wormhole: at Kreukenhof
seeing wormhole: A Solitude by Denise Levertov
shadow wormhole: alabaster balustrade
wind wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – The Valley

my // shell – poewieview #19

17 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by m lewis redford in poems, poeviews

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Tags

1970, 2016, Bowie, Buddha, delusion, desire, echo, eyes, forest, happiness, identity, karma, lifetimes, monkey, others, samsara, shadow, shell, the Three Poisons, thought, words

                                shadows whip `round me
                                sometimes before you’ve
                                thought your words

                                you cannot help it
                                I have echoes in my eyes
                                from all the “I”s that faded

                                too soon to cast open their
                                only desires left hanging tantalic,
                                your monkey’s hand held tight in the

shell^*

^* “the prince heard the cry of a monkey in the forest: it had been trapped by hunters who used a nut case which was so-shaped that a monkey’s hand could fit into the shell when opened flat, but not if the hand was held as a fist. The hunters placed food in the shell which greatly attracted the monkeys; when they put in their hands to grab the food they could not withdraw their hands, and yet they wanted the food so much that they would not let it go. And so they were trapped. This seemed to the prince that it might be the answer: beings find no happiness in life because the very act of trying to get happiness binds them to frustration. In selfishly trying to grab their own lives, they were trapped in them. The enemies to fight were the delusions within oneself: selfishness, pride, greed, belief in the self, anger, jealousy, hate, desire etc, those things which try to grasp happiness in life.”