after we resume our original nature

papaji

 

When the water returns

to its original oneness with the river,

it no longer has any individual feeling to

it; it resumes its own nature, and finds

composure. How very glad the

water must be to come

back to the original

river!

 

If this is so,

what feeling will we have

when we die? I think we are like the water

in the dipper. We will have composure then, perfect

composure. It may be too perfect for us, just now, because

we are so much attached to our own feeling, to our

individual existence. For us, just now, we have

some fear of death, but after we resume

our true original nature,

there is Nirvana.

 

Shunryu Suzuki

zen mind, beginner’s mind

don’t die

geoff mcfetridge

 

After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear
the frantic automatic weapons unleashed,
the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands,
that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw
that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s
left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned
orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can
you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek
bottom dry, to suck the deadly water up into
your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to
say: Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish
comes back belly up, and the country plummets
into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still
something singing? The truth is: I don’t know.
But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing
like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move
my living limbs into the world without too much
pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight
toward the pickup trucks break-necking down
the road, because she thinks she loves them,
because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud
roaring things will love her back, her soft small self
alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm,
until I yank the leash back to save her because
I want her to survive forever. Don’t die, I say,
and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings
high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay
her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth.
Perhaps we are always hurtling our body towards
the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love
from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe,
like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together
peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.

 

24th Poet Laureate of the United States