Hallelujah from the heart of Leonard Cohen
just took Leonard and his old scratchy voice
into my heart. What a gift my music app
just slung into my afternoon
to wake me from my late afternoon fatigue.

I do not take these tech gifts for granted
remembering when I would have to get the LP album
from off the crammed shelf and play it on a turntable.

Here in a moment of peace
I look up and see the trees
and the neighbor’s garden
beyond my windows.

And I thank God for this lovely peaceful moment
thank my old piano teacher
and the conductor of the Houston Youth Symphony
where I sang before my voice changed
and my parents who carpooled me from our suburb
to the old auditorium downtown
where my young mind and soul were nourished
by adults who cared for our young minds and voices.

Who knew that the gifts of these people
would spring up in my mind eight decades later
and mental images of Leopold Stokowski who directed us
at a grand concert in the Houston Music Hall.
He loved children but delivered high pitched hell
to the symphony players at rehearsals.

Judging my safety
Like collapsing sandcastles
Rough-built at high tide

Feeble foundations
Based on assumptions
Freak waves waiting

Only recently
I learnt that not everyone
Always feels afraid

Turn gently inward
To ask whether I’m okay
Quietly observe

The body holds the answers
Truer than the pliant mind

It is not somewhere over the rainbow
beyond Mother's breath or
in the devices of ancient
or modern hands bereft

we touch it in our pathos
and empathy from
time to time
through a shallow fading
gravel bed
filtering a bitter water table perhaps

whilst the tender leaf of spring feels it
in the autumn of unconditional
acceptance of the inevitable
morning frost
cold relentless rains
and colourful leaves
falling to their death
in beauty

so far removed from our bipedal posturing
and upright positioning at the computer
desk knowing there is no mystery here
no wild cry in the night
only electronic and organic
bleeps and drones and

aw! there… I heard it again

a lost chord
a missing link
that the wild
creatures understand
of what we sometimes feel nearer in our shared limbic
brain seldom penetrated through
our domineering eyes planted firmly in front
of the gray dross from an eternal fire

we spend our given time on
this planet trying to douse when the rest
of creation knows the need for its
purification and leaps willingly into its
all-consuming heart as we
live in fear of the unknown
and of fear itself

keeping us estranged from the cosmic mysterium which provokes us to awaken
to the wondrous eternal
which will
alter our deluded consciousness
to see what has been seen through the
unknown eons to help us take to the fire

we only catch a whiff of in the twilight
of our hopes and selfless dreams
so we will rise through the
dry brown leaves of our once tender
green vision of an ever-changing universe
which whispers louder and louder in our darkness
until we cease our chatter and
learn to listen to the serene silence
of an eternal vibration heightening

morphing less organic much more
ethereal spiritual crawling further and further
from the pulse of the earth
as we shed thickened skin which
once replaced thin soft unprotected flesh
needing protection from extraneous
sources to cover what should have been

eternally naked bare to the elements
not limited to a frail carcass which
will ultimately be left behind as we
transform into our individual eternal temples to
join in worship with the rest of creation
to be the living offering
at the foot of the
eternal voice ineffable
not waiting to be obeyed
in mass procession but

as individual as one spark igniting
a plot of trees newly released as mystery
revealed ever so slightly in the wake of
the burial of earthbound mind steeped in
temporal ancient tradition fermented in
oak casks which were made to remain
and grow in their ****** state

as we hear distant yet distinct whispers of
the origin of our human calling above and beyond
Thoreau's distant drummer’s near silent tremors of the
most ancient rhythms now mostly echoes as we
march to
and follow our own drummer
leading the way back home

as we at times seem to distinctly
hear original rhythm's calling
as we try so earnestly to
respond like a dying sea
longing to once again sway
to the beckoning moon

often keeping in step
with our
own inner drummer who
is always trying to keep
time by asking

"are we prepared to give
in to what we will
inevitably meet in the end?"