HE SAID… SHE SAID…

Gossip and slander
is pouring water
on the earth.

A knife scraping a stone
does not bruise it.

Even Buddha images
are tarnished.

How can a man of earth
escape censure.

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CALCULATIONS

Space you measure in feet and inches
and shoes by where your big toe pinches;
seasons by cherry, rose and snow,
when may comes and swallows go:
empires by rise and fall of kings;
weather by rain and drought and flood;
dead trees by whether the dragon sings
flowers by when they seed and bud.

But how do you measure silence?
Or the space between two thoughts?
Or the point where forces balance?
Or the product of two noughts?
Or where the shadows fade to
when the sun sinks in the west?
Or how your deeds are weighed you
as your life drifts into rest?

Houses go from stone to dust.
The builder is himself undone.
The gate is broken and gone to rust.
Nothing survives from sun to sun.

What was there before the beginning
lingers when stars now born are dead;
in the absence of suns is ever shining;
when nothing is thought and nothing said.

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THE MORE YOU SHARE

The more you know
the more you owe.

The more you care
the more you share.

The less you share
your
debts grow
more.

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BETHANY

In the grey mist of an English dawn,
the starling stamps and prods and probes
and generally disturbs
the lawn,
seeking to confirm
an English proverb.

Beneath the green of an English lawn,
the patient worm
catches
the bird.

In this numbing
cosmic dance,
each one gives
and takes his chance
to feel and find
in flesh and mind
the ambiguous secrets of becoming.

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HE THAT HAVE EARS LET HIM HEAR

The buzzing in the Brain
forms a screen
so that what is really quite plain
is hardly heard or seen
-ubiquitous and trans-eternal Pain.

Voices
drifting on the winds of space,
leaves from the Tree of Time;
telling the Seasons,
warning of disasters to come,
(or already here),
of evil lapping at the threshold,
of the omnipresent worm,
of the spider spinning his web in the palaces of kings,
of the need for mindfulness,
and purity.

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THE FOUNTAIN

The fountain
reaches upwards into space
and, finding nothing
to sustain it there,
falls back into its proper place.

And in this endless
rise and fall,
we see the start and finish
of us all.

Time flies
through summer and through wintry skies;
measures elephants and butterflies,
marks where this is born and that one dies.
See the world dissolve and fade before your dying eyes!

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SQUARING THE CIRCLE

How glad I am
that I am here
and not somewhere else.

(If I were
somewhere else,
I’d be here.)

No escape, then!

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PYTHAGORAS AT THE OLYMPICS

Three classes of people
attended the Games in honour of Zeus.

The lowest kind to buy and sell.
The middle to compete.
The highest to watch.

So it is with human society
– those Games in honour of power and wealth.

The highest are the true philosophers.
They do not do anything.
They just observe.

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I, ME, MINE

A flower does not think or see
and cannot
therefore
feel itself
as ‘me’.

Seeing
tempts us
out of being
and what is seen
provokes the question:
“Who?”
And hence the echoed answer:
“You!”

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EXCUSES

In the pursuit of pleasure
(or the relief of pain),
they abuse their leisure
and then return to work again.

In the pool when the water is clear
a thousand activities appear;
a network of looking, seeing, willing;
of turning, diving, chasing, catching, killing.

Nowhere is there a place where one might hide
when everywhere is bright and clear inside.

A wind blows and the surface now confuses,
reflects the sky
and “I” and “My”
– opaque and deviant excuses;
a wind of words.

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