The Book of Life (Days of Awe)
Who writes
Who reads
The sentences
In careful paragraphs and chapters
That follow ancient codes?
Or the disjointed scrawl,
Random and indecipherable,
No system at all?
The contest is closing in days.
Who judges the book,
By what rules?
How will we know
If we win or lose?
Another new year growing old,
Another life on the shelf.
Confused Birds
These birds are confused
Not angry
Wondering where
The cold winds are.
Exulting in
Extended summer.
What’s time to a bird
Or me?
The line “What’s time to a bird” is borrowed from a favorite joke with a surprisingly philosophical punch line. It goes something like this:
A guy is driving along a country road. He sees a farmer under an oak tree, holding up a pig so the pig can eat acorns. The guy stops. “You know,” the guy says, “it would be a lot easier and take a lot less time if you just shook the tree and let the acorns fall to the ground.” “Maybe,” says the farmer, “but what’s time to a pig?”
More about birds:
In the sky a bird was heard to cry.
Misty morning whisperings and gentle stirring sounds
Belied a deathly silence that lay all around.
Hear the lark and harken to the barking of the dog fox gone to ground.
See the splashing of the kingfisher flashing to the water.
Grantchester Meadow, Pink Floyd
“Well, then, just what does it mean that everybody has the Buddha Mind?…in the course of listening to my talk, if a dog barks outside the temple, you recognize it as the voice of a dog; if a crow caws, you know it’s a crow…you didn’t come with any preconceived idea that if, while I was talking, there were sounds of dogs and birds, children or grown-ups somewhere outside, you were deliberately going to try to hear them. Yet here in the meeting you recognize the noises of dogs and crows outside and the sounds of people talking… the fact that you recognize these things you didn’t expect to see or hear shows you’re seeing and hearing with the Unborn Buddha Mind.”
From Bankei Zen: Translations from the Record of Bankei
Dawn Trees – Bob Schwartz
Delayed Autumn
Still green trees
Still a fresh memory of summer.
Am I fooled by the colors
Thinking red leaves are flowers?
They are only
Splendidly dying.
The trick is to be no more caught up in the autumn and winter of autumn and winter than in the spring and summer of spring and summer. Hard, hard.
Music of Other Tables
Half listen so
Duets from other tables
Are sounds minus meaning
Words to notes
Scales of breakfast
And lives.
First Geese
Easy to see
Against the light gray
A flying line of ten.
Before the look
A single honk.
Scan the sky.
Morning is the clock
Geese the calendar
Read standing
Neck bent up
As they disappear
Dragging the north wind
Behind them.
Late Harvest Moon Poem
The harvest moon unseen
Shining in a dark cloudless sky.
Looking now
The sun struggles
Clouds rain.
It was there then
Will be again.
It will not be
The last one I miss.
It is a tradition to write poems at the time of the harvest moon. Missed it, and so this is born late. Okay, because the time and weather have changed, as they always do.
Harvest
I dug furrows
Some deep
Some straight
And others.
Seeds buried
Or strewn
Where they fell.
Rained when it did
Sun and moon.
Harvest now
Wondering whether
The crop or me
Was supposed to grow.
Tuning Fork
Strike and resound
A single perfect note
Against which
Our poor play is practiced.
The texts are ancient
Thoughts in a case
Replaced by the
Younger and fresher.
This tuning fork
Centuries old.
Bring me a gadget
A gizmo
To give me my pitch.
Ah but
The warm simple beauty
Of the vibrating metal
Is the practice
Before the practice.
Fallen Petal
Petals
The petals have
Begun to fall
This one still
Moist and colorful
Soon dry and brown.
At first
Mindlessly discarded
Now retrieved.
The stems
Will be bare.
What then?
Reason
Reason
as solid
as a rock.
Clinging to it
in the middle
of the ocean.
When I look to friends, colleagues and mentors who have taught and influenced me, I see in many of them a happy and helpful balance of reason and spirit. I thank them, and recommend having such people in your life.
This may be what I might want others to say of me, that I neither abandoned reason nor clung to it too tightly.
Bob Schwartz 