You didn't come here to get mangled

Painting by Rashani Rea

You didn't come here to get mangled
by the gleaming machinery of the Mind.
You didn't come here to get welded and forged into a
Republican, Democrat, Sunni or Shi'a,
to get angry at your jagged shadow in broken glass,
or see your own reflection as approaching disaster.
You came to be astonished by a dust mote.
You came to find the Maker of all things
embodied in a dandelion.
You are here to be torn by laughter and pain,
then healed by the tang of a berry
on your wild tongue.
There are no right angles, no straight lines
in the serpent body of the earth.
Valleys, rivers, and hills are the only borders.
Dark-eyed Mother Raven looks down
and sees them as restless waves in the ocean
of Holy Matter.
What makes this planet sacred
is the unfinished circle, not the wall.
What guides us is the wayless curve
in a labyrinth of fallen alder leaves after the storm,
a cloud that stains the soft rice paper sky,
brushstroke of geese in flight.
Why waste another moment arguing
for or against
when you could slip back down a beam
of breath, soft as moonlight,
into the silent radiance you Are?

-  Alfred K. LaMotte

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