by Alan Harris
2002
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Both harmlessness and light? I bow to you, Saint Bug. |
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Free PDF download of this entire book: Fireflies Don't Bite in Adobe Acrobat PDF format (27 formatted pages including color photos) Free Adobe Acrobat Reader is required. |
Contents
(Click on any divider between poems to return here.)
The Water
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You cry your first in your mother's arms. The water trickles down the drain. You soon grow into a toddler's knowing. The water flows beneath the streets. You attend your schools for diplomas, degrees. The water enters a nearby stream. You have your wedding, children, career. The water joins a seaward-flowing river. You make mistakes in ethics; health goes weak. The water reaches the peace of the sea. You retire from your career to savor life. The water now is one with all the seas. You suffer through precursors of mortality. The water feels a need to rise. Your body quits, and you leave it where it is. The water rises through a mist into a cloud. You enjoy long bliss in the space of Light. The water joins a darkening cloud. You feel a longing toward the physical again. The water rains down and seeps into a well. Your vision of the Light has faded now. The water is drawn from the well for drinking. You feel confined and utterly doomed. The water breaks. You cry your first in your mother's arms. The water trickles down the drain. |
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January Adagio
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Tonight at 10:30 I went out for my walk. In the distance I heard a major commotion of geese. At first I thought a flock might fly overhead, though the hour was far too late for geese to be aloft. But the sound wasn't moving. I heard a train's rumble, then its mournful horn. A freight was crossing the railroad bridge over the Fox River close to where the geese were overnighting. As I turned around toward home I still could hear them fret and scold in chaotic counterpoint with the diesel's basso continuo. And the stars tonight burned bright holes in the sky, decorating bare tree branches overhead like lingering holiday lighting. After the train had rumbled off to where nocturnal trains all go, the neighborhood assumed a hush perturbed only by my footsteps. Hardly anything is quieter than distant sleeping geese and star-bespeckled trees. |
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A Meditation
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In the where of almost lies more somejoy than define inchly gives. Streamtake and heartgive are so many too softness for headly grasp to box. If seldom all many center in one boundless allitude, one oneity can still still. |
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Prayer in Brief
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I bow with heart in hand to offer up my life for larger Life, for brighter Light, for Joy. |
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Karma Yoga
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Living every hour in the exact middle of my weaknesses, I work some more. Knowing the ways I fell apart before and took poor paths, I work some more. To piece together my fragmentary feelings for peace, I work some more. Pretty sure I will later fail to restrain some urges within me, I work some more. When all of my jobs on earth are done and I'm in and out of heaven, I will work some more. |
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Bird Omens
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When you go for a walk in your nearby forest, you see pairs of cardinals and thrill to their singing. One time you overheard two owls conversing between bare trees. In summer you have stared breathless at a heron standing Samadhi-like beside your lake. Birds of beauty want to be near you. Your heart flies up with these fliers and knows into their knowing. Today as I walked across an open field, hundreds of crows flew overhead, snidely cawing from confusing clouds of cacophony. After they were gone, I walked on in silence and knew nothing. |
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Path
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One mountain to climb One abyss to pass over One crow cawing law |
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Our John Deere Model A with manual flywheel starting
Farmer Karma
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I was a boy farmer because I had to be because my father was a man farmer and all my granddads back to almost Adam had been boy farmers and man farmers and that was that. I hardly even realized that I hated farming but just did it because and forever because. I learned how to sharpen a hoe and cut through my hot-day reluctance in order to kill Canadian thistles in mechanical planticide. Dad told me that the county thistle warden might assess us a fine if we had too many thistles. Chop, chop, chop, I spiraled into each patch and then on to the next, never finishing them all. I learned how to start the John Deere Model A tractor by yanking the top of its flywheel mightily to the left with the petcocks open to reduce compression until things got to popping then closing the petcocks for more power. That Model A and I were partners who bounced across years of bumpy soil pulling a drag or a disk or a 3-bottom plow. High in the bucket seat, teeth into the gritty air, I was as much a slave to the A as it to me, as much a slave to the farm as any farmer is. I shoveled grain inside bins where dust polluted the air and filled my lungs so full that a time or two I almost died from asthma. But dying would be a slacker's excuse, and the grain had to be leveled. In the haymow there was also, guess what, dust and heat enough to turn my lungs into solid protoplasm-- what bronchial tubes? When older, I got to stay outside and throw the bales onto the Mayrath hay elevator and breathe the same good air that our cows all breathed. I was always dutiful. I never gave Dad a single hint that I didn't like farming. No hint, that is, other than my stoic attitude, my yes-boss obedience, my lack of any initiative, and my slipshod work. These failings didn't matter because there was the farm and there were we and the earth was turning and the weather was erratic and new work grew up as fast as the precious corn. Dad never tried to teach me anything technical about how to farm. He could see my soul. One look at me on any day of any week told him that this boy would never be a farmer. No point in telling the boy how best to rotate crops or how to repair a combine or how to choose fertilizer or when to sell the grain. Such breath would have been as wasted as a cold March wind across the railroad field. Dad was a good farmer and a good man. Farming is good, too. We get to eat from it. But farming gets glorified pretty often, and I never partook of that schmaltz. I was a tractor driver who would watch train after train go by on the Burlington and wave at the engineers and caboosemen, all of us dutifully chained to our turning wheels. I was a manure pitcher and a manure spreader who knew the cows had to produce this but didn't see my future in it. Farmer karma was my inherited destiny until college days when I learned how to be amply engrossed in motions of the mind and never later hankered for any life on any farm. |
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Itinerant
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On my electric wire a bold red cardinal brimming with eons of joyful songs loudly greets the day from his overflow while I on my lawn try to reconstruct from tuneful parts an ancient whole before he flies to another yard. |
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Pain and Promise
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If only it How can I When will this Can I ever Is there any Why am I This is too Better is later This shall pass Now to learn We are loved Never all alone Be in being Endure in light |
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Upbeat
 and exaltations.world of pitfallsamazingly beautifulthrough thisleft-right-leftas we all treadcorrectable anomaliespleasant days andI wish you |
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Thank You
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Thank most you for all little things big. Beams of kindness illumine all paths of you and I am days on end in your gentle debt. Accept please this as my up payment. |
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Night Light
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Melancholy needs a walk, so out I carry it at 11 p.m. to study two universes, out and in. Our neighborhood is dotted with random porch and yard lamps lighting the way for nobody and me. An hour above setting in the west, our less-than-first-quarter moon smiles inscrutably like a queen in state. Gliding through the trees, she offers only used rays to my heart, but light being now difficult to find, I accept. With far-away stars shining only because they must, above a neighborhood where yard lamps are glowing, thanks to owners, a breath now washes through my chest inviting me to turn my melancholy over to night's infinite matrix of Beings who shine. I do, and return home with lungs full of light from outer and inner space, and from yard lamps left on for all who walk. |
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Man Walking
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There is a man walking behind me on Wood Street in Chicago. He can't know my heart hums a surging theme from Movement 1 of Mahler's Tenth. He can't know why I am walking on Wood Street in Chicago. And why am I? It takes too long to think about. Who is this man behind me, walking? What flavors his feelings? What obstacles has he overcome? What song is in him? I somehow am this man walking on Wood Street in Chicago. I am his walkingness behind me, his grapplingness with his day. I can only know my own form but he and I are breathing of the same Breath. Mahler's Tenth plays on within me as I enter a building. The man continues along the street paying absolutely no attention to me, this man walking on Wood Street in Chicago who I am. |
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Some Kind of Haiku
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Some kind of haiku that ignores authorities lies here in the grass. |
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Our First Warm Day
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If I were to write about our first warm day of spring, I would write about the stuttering burglar-alarm honks of a car two blocks away. I would write about our waving neighbor who slowly rides his motorcycle out into the breeze, seeming to think nothing of his vulnerability. I would write about the silent force that brings the daffodils to bloom and emboldens secret romances. I would write about children loudly vying for token goals and supremacies in outdoor made-up games. I would write about the lush air playing inside my chest in C-major. I would write about Celestial Light beaming upon all and within all while taken for granted by most. I would watch the setting sun, listen to the dusk birds, watch for the first star, pray my drop into the Beneficent Stream that flows within every person's heart and every star's, then drop into the heights to write without a pen upon the folds of Infinity's Cloak about our first warm day of spring. |
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World
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Is a world hard like a cue ball? Or beyond touch? Does it jangle with war threats or does it hum soft in the heart like tuned strings on a fine harp? Is a world separate I's on a spinning rock engaged and enraged with each other while blinded by what they can merely see? Or is a world precisely who one can be (within utmost Who) subtler than mind with endless stairs from love up to Be? |
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Urges
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wild wind blow me safe into all here all here let me fly out on wild wind |
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An Inward East
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To calm a care or soothe an anger storm you pause to breathe your vital inside sun and, richly quiet with its steady glow of coremost tenderness and flooding peace, you reinterpret body's aching bones as levers placed for mystic ministry, propelled and infinitely smiled upon by forces which, when tapped, give tenfold strength. You find your earth eyes lidded from the room and focused now on lightened higherness. In light we are as one, beloved friend. How can a doubt or fear feel more than mere when in and up we set our inner sight to see a splendor further east than east? |
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July Brushstrokes
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gradual sliding low of Sol... flashings out when trees allow... sidewalk bathed in fading light... yellow-green this muted hour... whitening sky holds twilit breath... shadows paint each passing trunk... cicadas sing "six weeks till frost"... hints of night inspire bird choirs... all scent all sound all inner yes... |
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Absence
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I always thought that you, dear Friend, had been away due to a long, far journey. I thought I knew you well, although I had no memory of ever seeing you. Stirring stories I heard about your distant deeds, and I felt a link with you though never saw your face. I ask you in my heart, "How long, how far from here has questing taken you? Does destiny intend for me again to hear your voice?" My white-haired years now tell me it is I who traveled out upon that long, far journey. Soon I will be coming back to share my life's adventures with you in a place not far away nor danger-filled, a place as near as breath and pulse. I've missed your easy laugh and kindly voice, dear Friend, but soon enough we'll meet again to pray the prayers of ancient days. |
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Ones
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I spot a one. He changes lanes abruptly right in front of me, no signal. My teeth clench. He is number one in his machismo, and I a separate one in irritation. Another one is following my car close enough to fill my mirror. I want to slow down and teach him a lesson, but instead I simmer along as one trapped. I notice my cozy tailgater is flying an American flag above his window, loyal in some kind of patriotism, separate in some kind of jingoism, and I explore my intolerance. By "ones" I mean sequestered minds, "me" people in a universe of "not me." Ones will celebrate their personal glory then perish into their self-created void. Ones will say we go around just once, done, with no later come-arounds, so that when the gustoed body quits, the mind joins Big Zero forever. Why don't I think the same as that? With not one proof that holds a drop, I see a future human state unhindered by me-centric rivalries. Birthing time and time again, evolving life by life eternally, it seems to me we'll someday give up being ones, and enter fully the community of Unity where competition isn't. Though now I seem a one to any other one as the other one, for now, may seem a one to me, I hear an inner-speaking Spirit say that all of us are one with Utmost One and separated mainly by our walled-off minds and pretty bags of bones. |
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Remembrance
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Remembering tells me I was never not, nor were you nor anyone. Arteries in the Cosmos are pulsing with light and life and love in a flow never ceasing yet constantly changing in form and expression. Peace it is to remember these arteries that feed from out of the Unseen, their pulsings uncountable, their inner motions subtler than any evening breeze. Remembering upward and inward, how not feel vitality from the One? I remember (don't you?) the beauty within trust, the safety of community, the triumph of cooperation, the brave sureness of joy, love as easy to find as air. Remembering as I do and perhaps as you do, how could one not return? |
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Bug in My Kitchen
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Let me guess, box-elder bug on my kitchen floor, that you know neither how you came to be lost in here nor how you will get out--but you will. Fright-propelled boat, six-oared, you worry the woodwork then hasten across the open gloss and disappear beneath my stove. I shall not hunt you nor shall we ever meet again. I am just as adrift on this waxed world as you were on my floor, and yet I feel certain I will someday find a serendipitous stove to mask my out-passing. |
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Unclosed Loops
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Life after rollicking life I have littered and frittered but mostly learned within unclosed loops. The room where I work is a monument to get-out-and-leave-out and all my other rooms imitate such open loops. Shall I dare to suggest that every spiral is an unclosed loop? And point out that spirals are the basis of life on all of its planes? Closed-loop people I have seen, dazzling in their neatness, smilingly prompt, dickensly proud of their punctilious buttoned-downishness. Do devotees of closed loops expire with a snap, I wonder? And will I expire someday with an ambiguous sigh? Let's broadly hint that perhaps people never do expire but instead subscribe over time to suitably-spiraled-up bodies, incremental costumes for playing parts in this human drama of infinite run. "Death" is all the rage these eons, but only for those who think their eyes see all there is to see. Let's even risk wondering whether supposedly closed loops might be minor quanta within major evolving spirals. Unclosed as my loops are, I admit to irritating the tidy. Closed, the tidy may enjoy their control, but beyond their cubishness a universe swirls with intranesting spirals that may little praise the painful righteousness of an organized desk drawer. Now, where is that CD I bought yesterday? Has it spiraled off? |
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