You sit in so many different places, in a park, in an office, in a subway, in a car. The scenes around you change, like maelstroms, like rapids, and yet the center remains. The eye is fixed, and it watches, and somehow in that watching, what solidifies the eye and differentiates it from the transience, also begins to change. Mountains once the pinnacle of awe become speedbumps on a road, and what used to stain the heart with disdain earns paternal empathy. The eye that watches becomes the eye of change, and seer and scene move adjacent to one another. It’s a dance, a dance of becoming, where the theme that drives the rounding and bending and turning and leaping does not end, instead ebbs and softens then hardens, quiets then explodes—and there is only beginning. You are a continuum, and when you reach a hand to touch the handrail, you are the cool metal turned heat and the pumping of blood within every artery of animal life. The pigeon that flies overhead is the freedom between your temples that millions around the world cry out for as they are crushed by the immense weight of your boot. How like a stampede you are, through rain slicked neon streets, through dry dead grass patched earth, through glades in the hearts of forests that circulate with red ants carrying the nutrients of a day left hot and shivering after the sex of life and death. The lamb is born, and with it the sin, and on the mountain meditates a Hindu monk that knows the letters that make up your name. It is his name as well, and that of she who lives at the base, the base of your desires and dreams and despair, and in the mirror shares your face. And somehow, with all this change around and within you, you sit, here, there, and everywhere, reading this.
I love the ending of this poem … how it begins in a motionless posture, all this sitting and then picks up in energy and movement. Moving almost from the small and somewhat steady to the sweeping and cosmic — this sense of being everywhere and in everything in the dance of continual becoming. And then the ending — it feels so intimate and grounding and reflective of the circular motion of this dance, ending where the poem began.✨💫
Thank you for reading and engaging with the piece, Naila. There are so many spirals in nature, from whirlpools to human behavior to the clockwork of the galaxy. The features of the cycling change, but what remains as a constant is the spiraling, the motion that wears the different colors of life. You caught the essence of this idea as it is illustrated in the poem. Your insight is keen, and your language is poetry in itself. Thank you again for taking your time to read this.
As always, your words bring a kinetic energy that is so real, I forget I’m reading. I can feel the concentric circles rippling as the poem moves; as the words take us from stillness to motion and small to cosmic, the motion takes us from mundane to universal, only to show us it’s all the same and has been the whole time. This poem is an embodiment of itself. Beautiful as always. 🌿✨
Thank you for reading and for sharing your thoughts, Heather. Your description of the poem’s movement reminds me of a whirlwind. 😉
You stated my intention very clearly, which was crafting a poem that from title, external and internal structure, and imagery express a singular idea. The wholeness you allude to. I enjoyed reading the way you surmised it, as your comment was a journey in itself, akin to being carried along a light breeze.