09 July 2022

Open Access to Everything Holy

 



Morning writing abandoned, now

movement catches my attention:

The flicker of a cat’s tail?  Wind

lifting curtain wings?  Gravity

taking a dying jade plant leaf?

 

Exceptions to stillness focus

and magnify what stillness is:

Being, becoming, holiness—

does the word matter?  The invite

is from beyond or from within—

how much does direction matter?

 

Tuning in may be easier

indoors than outdoors where

constant motion creates a tone—

where tone broken reveals itself:

a car’s horn or screech, a hawk’s

plunge, a song, a sudden silence.

 

These skips that expose steadiness

plunge us less into the past than

into the promise that we will

lose ourselves again and again,

be swept into the universe.

 

Love sweeps me off my feet again.

Whether or not I notice.  I know it.

We know truth magnified when shared,

when congregated, when worded,

when expected, when accepted.


 

posted at earthweal open link weekend #126; written for earthweal weekly challenge: WILD STILLNESS



My blog poems are rough drafts.
Please respect my copyright.
© 2022 Susan L. Chast

 

5 comments:

  1. Kim Whysall-Hammond aka The Cheesesellers Wife7/09/2022 11:32 AM

    Lovely! Especially:

    "Exceptions to stillness focus and magnify what stillness is: Being, becoming, holiness "

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  2. Sherry Blue Sky7/09/2022 8:50 PM

    This is so lovely, Susan. The heart takes flight reading it. I especially love "Love sweeps me off my feet again." It does me, too, surrounded by the natural world, by animals, by "the peace of wild things." No matter what, it is such a beautiful world.

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  3. Rajani7/10/2022 12:29 AM

    That second verse is everything... absolutely loved it! Totally resonates.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ingrid7/10/2022 5:36 AM

    Lovely! When I struggle to write, I go outside and find inspiration in nature :-)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Brendan7/10/2022 7:46 AM

    Lovely response to the challenge -- it makes me wonder if absence of motion is a truly internal condition of stillness, whereas outside it is the stilness of the observer who perceives the wild as still, even though it is a thousand motions at once. A "complicate amassing harmony" (as Wallace Stevens put it) in one "being, becoming, holiness." Abandonment to the nature of stillness is the central thought here as I read it -- magnificent, Susan.

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