Leave me alone.

Let birds come.

Let stones be laid on stones.

Leave me alone.

I waken streets

when I walk through processions

of trees.

Kalamazoo Nature Center, Early Autumn 2012

              Under branches

I remember journeys

when I rose to foreign

suns and let the morning

seal my secrets.

Leave me alone.

A light has always

led me home.

A voice is always calling.
~Adonis

Adonis. The Pages of Day and Night. Translated from the Arabic by Samuel Hazo. The Marlboro Press/Northwestern. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2000.

Lament of the Turquoise Bee

My mind roams by day;

I cannot sleep at night.

Daily affairs have no end;

Fatigue is my only friend.

~Tsangyang Gyatso (The Sixth Dalai Lama)

*untitled poem translated by G.W. Houston in Wings of The White Crane:
Poems of Tshangs dbyangs rgya mtsho (1683-1706). Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass, 1967.

All that has changed…

The mountains remain the same,
As do the trees and streams…
All that has changed
Is my heart.

~ Bennen

Be not curious about God…

And I say to mankind,
Be not curious about God,

For I who am curious about each am not curious
about God,

(No array of terms can say how much I am
at peace about

God and about death.)

I hear and behold God in every object, yet
understand God not in the least,

Nor do I understand who there can be more
wonderful than myself.

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?

I see something of God each hour of the
twenty-four, and each moment then,

In the faces of men and women I see God, and in
my own face in the glass,

I find letters from God dropt in the street, and
every one is sign’d by God’s name,

And I leave them where they are, for I know that
wheresoe’er I go,

Others will punctually come for ever and ever.

- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Water Basin

A bamboo dipper
resting on two red branches
bound by fraying twine.