Epiphany

And so, the season of Christmas comes to its end. I always liked that there’s a feast day called “Epiphany”, even if I don’t practice it in any particular way; I often wait until today to make resolutions as well. (Not all of them, though: I find myself setting goals all year long.) The first week is still holiday time, and if you party hard on New Year’s Eve, the absolute last thing you feel like doing the day after is hitting the gym to start working on that killer bod you’re definitely going to get this year. Give it a week, then start, I say.

DVerse is asking for poems about peace, and I couldn’t really think of any particular topic to write about. So this is just a small musing about that principle I keep dragging out from time to time: you have to love the entire world, good and bad, to get through it and reach enlightenment. The good things you love are the ones you seek to keep; the bad things require love to care enough to change them. That’s how I want to get through the world, but twenty-odd years and I’m still trying to get there.

Epiphany

It took me a long time to love the spiderweb
strung with diamonds in the morning window
and even longer
for the winter that carves the breath and
the rains that creep rivers over their banks;

and I am still trying to love the swallowed
snake of disease and the threatening men
cracking their knuckles in the dark;
I meditate over sharp-edged
mathematics and the bullet flowering with blood;

someday there will be room in my heart
for everything; that will be the small
nirvana that comes
murmuring green and gold to lead the way
through a world that’s grown complete.

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