“Light takes the tree but who can tell us how?”—Theodore Roethke

When imaginal light floods the mind receptive

carves a Bosporus where a tanker plows its freight

steaming eastwards like an insomniac’s tortured

evening and a robust blue skinned swimmer pounds

her warrior’s arms swirling towards her lover on the Asian shore

perched upon a Vespa sputtering contentment,

and when the humble breathing body careens

with its moles, fatigue, scars and scabs towards

a holy sprinting, a limping dance inside

a manic undertow,

what then occurs may take our babbled breath away

earthquakes us to another kind of earth

where caterpillar ooze births a lone

imaginal cell, old testament for the good news’ butterfly

as we’re plunged like seed 3,000 feet beneath this ground

--are bewildered in the boisterous heaving--

all the way from last century’s insane wars, those years

of bloodshed bombed out Dresden Guernica Nagasaki,

Dachau’s cattle cars of clustered skeletons, China’s

perfumed slavery days king opium on his tawdry throne,

let’s not forget Vietnam and those dirty tricks,

to the cloistered monks of worthy Benedict

and the MASTERS OF THE GOLDEN WAY

and far, so far beyond….

ahh, when imaginal light floods the mind receptive

updated by @ceri-shaw: 02/17/19 02:38:43AM