liturgical
the passing moment a breath subsumed by
the substrate of light become a subterfuge
when logic no longer suffices and each
word become a nostrum of hope, belief.
each hour has reached an apotheosis of blind
faith, the same name once the skin and bone
of a mother, her hand held in her last days
in mine, because of what use are such
moments except to hold and to let go from.
each day i am reminded, is one next to
the last, and so i do not waste it in lossless
release and fecund folly: that of the conceit
that time is as everlasting as day as
given as the next as riven as the vast.
each year has glided into vision like the
gilded lotus it is and i am thankful for
the breath that has lined its edges and
limned its pages with the tokens of meaning,
form noble in emptiness, fraught, singular.
this life o well has it arrived: the miracle and
the mundane compelling bliss and suffering
alike; as each step, each hour, each day,
each year become the hum that love —
found, illumined, taken wing... so, abided.
[ The poem's title occurred to me as I was walking up Franklin late this afternoon, just past Thomas Starr King's sarcophagus near the intersection with O'Farrell; and it also came to my memory that I hadn't written one of these in a good long while. How wasteful. ::chuckle:: ]
