Category Archives: Poetry

The Art of Happiness

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The Art of Happiness

The point in a workout when the sweat pours from your body
And the blood thrums in your veins as the muscles add
Their melody of vitality to a percussive beat as salty streams
Run towards the floor and everything else can wait
While your clear mind listens to the body’s song of life
 
The scent of baked muffins fills the house with a sweet fragrance.
Each one warm from the oven, soft and fluffy to the touch
As it crumbles in your mouth it releases its domestic magic
Awakening the tongue to taste and savor. Its small gift.
The alchemy of baking awakens a little taste of joy.
 
An auditorium full of people sings along each individual
Knowing each word, each note as they sing together.
Echoing the band, entering the communal euphoria
Of a people united around this moment in melody.
A song that strikes a common chord of shared humanity.
 
When a story catches its stride and grabs hold of the reader
The words have transformed from characters upon the page
To fellow travelers on a shared journey on the canvas of the mind,
As real as the world forgotten beyond the pages of the book.
While you share the dream of the author and live another life.
 
So many possible paths into happiness, and yet no path is a guarantee:
If the body is alienated from itself and no longer dances,
When food becomes merely fuel for the body something consumed,
If a broken heart is too heavy with grief to join in the beloved song,
When the story you enter is written for another reader.
 
Psychology can seek the science of happiness knowing what causes it.
I prefer the art of happiness with its messy brushstrokes on canvas,
Its awkward first steps learning to dance, listening to the emotions,
Taking a mental photo of each moment as it comes and delighting in it.
Grateful for the surprise of joy and slowing down to let it engulf the moment.

Someone Else’s Fortune

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As the slip of paper emerges from the cracked cookie
My eyes focus on words that can only be
Someone else’s fortune

The words may have fitted any number of the possible lives I’ve grieved
Sure, they are supposed to be generic enough to fit many lives
But the particularity of my experiences transgresses the boundaries
Of Someone else’s fortune

This simple sentence of a throw away piece of paper
Becomes a mental pathway to the present that never was to be
To dreams stillborn and paths that receded into the past
An invitation to rumination upon hopes I thought long buried
Of the someone else that those paths would have created
If this wasn’t someone else’s fortune, but mine

Rapture

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Dime sized toads hop across the pavement in the early morning light
While hot air balloons in their brightly colored tops float by slowly
A rabbit peaks up from its morning meal as the traveler passes through
Warily watching this newcomer passing through its dining room
On the edge of a wheat field hidden behind a tall wall of weeds
A small refuge from the ever-creeping growth of the city
So much life missed by those who fly past in their cars
Starting their morning tasks, blind to the world around
But the solitary traveler stands in a moment of rapture
Whistling a traveler’s tune seeing with eyes tuned to wonder
As the world slowly awakes to the warmth an early summer day.

Empty Words

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 Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity. Ecclesiastes 1:2
 
Hiding behind our English ‘vanity’ is the Hebrew ‘hevel’
It is the name of the victim of Cain’s murderous rage
Abel (Hevel), the faithful one whose blood the earth drinks
Protesting to the heavens over the violation of its soil
By this fratricide to appease Cain’s wounded pride

Hevel is an evanescent word for vapor or mist or emptiness
It is the emptiness of a politician’s hopes and prayers
As more children are sacrificed on the gunmetal altar
It is there in the men who grasp after power
While they steal the innocence away from children
It is there as grocery stores become slaughterhouses
And houses of prayer become places of sacrifice
As ‘never again’ becomes ‘yet again’
As hope dies to despair in the vapid vociferousness.

How many Abels must die for us to turn from the emptiness
Before we look for something more substantial than smoke?
How many tears must fall upon the ground to wash away the blood?
How many broken lives and broken bodies before more is demanded
Than empty vanity? Words that vanish into thin air like smoke.
Words that taste like an ashtray as their cancerous residue remains.

I would rather scream into the abyss than speak the empty words
To grieving parents and broken communities in a shattered world.
Yet, these vain words are spread like fertilizer over the tomb stones
That populate the fields where the innocents are planted.
Spoken by men who are satisfied with a society
That sacrifices its children so that nothing has to change.
Where vanities are laid upon vapid vanities and all remains emptiness.

 

Movement at the Wishing Well

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Staring at the coin plucked from my pocket
Mentally engraving my deepest longing on it
In the moment before if flies from my fingers
Landing with a subtle splash in the wishing well
A dream committed to these still waters
And the whimsical will of the universe
 
The ripples slowly make their way on the surface
Words unspoken, only a small plunk into the silence
Some small offering to the luck and chance of this place
And I stand, for a moment lingering on this hope
This strange ritual of longing and magic
A gift from today for a desired tomorrow
 
I turn and begin to walk from this space
Returning to the world where dreams go to die
Yet, something causes me to stay a last moment
At the edges of periphery, I see movement
I hear rustling among the trees lining the path
There is movement at the wishing well
 
Someone else stares at a simple coin they carry
A token to carry her wishes into the well
Another desire that travels from her fingers
Plunking into the waters, disturbing the surface
Radiating outward hope, desire, longing, chance
Perhaps in the depths our wishes will meet