New and improved but never finished.

The Dove's Midrash

birth--
there are a thousand
metaphors for newness - Tim Martin, Native American Poet from Approaching the Hunt

Prologue

"What fetus wants to leave the womb of the mother? There is food and comfort there, as there is in this life, al dun'ya, but this life is deceptive. Who prefers the comfort of death without knowing the landscape?" - Yusef the Shi'a of Kafra on the writings of Khalifa Ali bin Taleb.

I, the clot in the wound of an animal,
in stages became something else, then
something else again. I learned to eat
and then, to see the letters and call
to things by their names. My eyes
a healthy list of interpretations.
My legs grew long, the road
narrow became wider. Those who spoke
of distant lands, migrations
over lakes in the east,
came near. They saved me and coaxed
me away. This is the story of wings.

First

There were times before
when destination was
understood and like morning,
it was accepted,
a rigor mortis of the living
twitched and set-in.
Adventure along the way
is a gift, solid in the pocket:
rubbed gully stones,
and softer like tadpoles,
the pretty concoctions of the created,
the family of djinn and men.

All that sweet season,
a grub in the brew of God
I clambered through moss and mud
with bees in the melted frost
of erosions called spring.
I, of the blessed unwashed things
in tribes when three angels
mistook me, wore no shoes.
It was an accident of watching, a kind of trust.
Their eucharist was pleasant tasting,
seems a long time ago now.


Secondly,

adolescence is a case of yearning
where the Paris of adults,
is the commonality of details
in the zohar of all things.
Time doesn't wait for any of it,
it simply moves things
into the entropy of location,
womb to cradle to grave,
a perpetual beast with internal clocks
and only one possible demise
of variables, the ground on which you die,
a definite characteristic
with constant proof but no maps
and one history.


The Quest

Starting at once! like that!
walking became a flying,
legs turned to wing,
out the door! on the fly! off the nest!
an instinct befell me.
My parents, infected with loss so suddenly
vanished from sight, earthbound and gray,
their own wings tucked
into the Books of Ruth.
I was more than all the birds
in the world flocking out.
Aiming far, a phoenix
towards the Gulfs of Persia,
to continue a metamorphic dream,
beyond the fences
and traps of our own
and our communions.
The elders felt a treason turn
into knots of tortured eyes
as those of one's own kind do
when a lover of distinct color makes
the gutteral sounds of other places.

There

through a dizzying eon of chapters,
and punishing weathers,
toward a land of slaves who wrote
Berber tunes and spewed
pungent melodies into their dark tunics,
were jackals and feral pigs
living eye to eye, yet the hymns copied
in a cloister of cages during the partial
ablutions of the tender age, held little sway.
The distance of desire is an evolution
between appendage and need,
an adjunct to the separation
observed where age is not
a decline, but a seeking.

Gliding above the sound of barter
in parrot-filled markets below,
caught in that net of foreign echoes,
I fell as a pelting of stones
in a miracle of war, the yoked ox
with ready wings, a foreigner's chattel.
The brittle guess called choice serves
only the lucky and sometimes, the brave.
Never the damned or ungrateful.
I settled in the sand on Shebbat
not cursing the red ants or bound feet,
more lame than Noah and quite exhausted.
Ready to live the rest of more days
in the results of my voyage,
all that memory provides evaporated,
never going away, never coming back,
humming a sad, realistic tune:

we're all caught
angels gone
up in this chorus,
mysteries stolen,
books hidden,
hopes fading.

For The Universe As It Begins Again

Through the pleasantries unsuccessful,
the two seas lay on either side:
Eternal Bliss and the other Eternal Misery,
the event horizon quite visible between,
I folded my wings in a shuffle of papers
and the constant sleep of the first bride
until the stanza of a single dove
wandered about in the quiet,
to please the dusk and the red-fingered dawn
with the sudden flush of wing
and the sound as it vanished.

Mr. Ronci @ http://www.marclweber.com/sugarmule/frame12.htm said :

Through you
whatever we were
talking about becomes
a moment
of crows
in the sugarbeet fields
and wild sunflowers
12 feet tall.

Yes. Mr. Buddhist, I see that. There it is! A fine poet but I have no idea if he is a good monk.