Excerpted from Moonglow on Mercy Street
forthcoming on CSF Publishing
Birthing Pains
To see, everywhere,
brave little lights going up,
flares of hope and justice,
holding hands
to tip the scales
in a bond of solidarity,
a fire-chastened purge
and desire for change’s
holy golden grail,
the quest,
a blessed rhyme
and legacy,
with each and every
one of our hearts
breaking open
to scale the ribs of light
and become radical midwives
to a collective rebirth.
. . .
Seeds
The other day
I met a monk who juggled watermelon seeds
with his tongue.
When I asked him how he did it,
he spit the seeds at me,
a staccato stream of seeds
as if the monk were no monk at all
but rather a cartoon gangster, or vaudeville gunner.
I ducked.
All of the seeds flew over my head
except for one, the lone seed that clung
to the top of my shoulder.
The monk’s eyes wrinkled with silent laughter,
which soon emitted from his nostrils and mouth
as a soft hissing sound.
How do you do that, he pointed at the seed
perched on my shoulder.
I smiled and shrugged and the seed fell off.
On the way home I stopped at the grocery store and bought a
watermelon.
When I got home I cut it open and made a project out of seedremoval.
Then I tried juggling seeds with my tongue,
but couldn’t do it.
Several hours later, having not made any progress with my juggling
act,
I sat down and stared at the lovely sloppy wreckage of watermelon
and rind,
and at, or rather into the dreamlife of seeds gathered in a small
glass bowl.
I picked up one of the seeds and planted it on my shoulder.
It’s easy, I said, as if the monk were there watching and listening,
and his silence roared like the most marvelous applause.
. . .
The Silence
My friend
who lives in the woods
told me there’s
a silence there
he’s never heard before.
Said
he’s lived in the woods
for nearly twenty years
and while he’s heard
plenty of quiet,
volumes and volumes
of quiet,
the silence
that he’s now hearing
is something new,
a rare species
announcing its presence
like a changed vocabulary of air.
Which made me wonder—
Has the famously golden silence
about which
many monks and mystics
have waxed poetic,
has that silence
begun its infectious creeping
to a next level of pervasiveness
and reign,
its singular voice
growing stronger and stronger
in vying for the claims
of our deeper attention?
Are we, the humans,
being forced via paradigm shift
into becoming less,
so much wonderfully less
than we thought we were
or voiced ourselves to be?
There was a writer,
a German one,
who called for
and prayed at the altar
of the god of slowness,
and I like to imagine
that this man’s god would,
in matching pace to tone,
speak softly, a silky pulsing hush
gentling its way into
the hearts of those who listened,
as if eavesdropping at the edge of a dream,
where memory pooled to silver,
in thrall to tenderest wake.
. . .
Boundless
The sun rose today
and kissed my face all over—
Romance knows no bounds.
♠
For more on John Biscello, check out his Amazon Author Page here