Vijaya Sundaram

Poet, Musician, Teacher, and Amateur Visual Artist

Seeing-Seeding

Seeing-Seeding

©May 8th, 2014

By Vijaya Sundaram

 To exist in the world

Is to disrupt the even flow

The rhythm, the deep

Assurance of air, water,

Warmth, fire, sky, stars.

We get in the way,

Eager humans all,

While losing our way.

 

Stumbling over ourselves,

In our desperate eagerness,

Tumbling down precipices

To reach our receding goal,

We scatter hope and despair

And loss and gain

And joy and pain,

Refusing the stillness

That sits at the heart

Of an expanding universe.

 

For these I yearn:

 

To see a passionflower,

And become one in an instant,

To glimpse a hummingbird,

And whir and hum in the still air,

To lie beneath a tree

Like a simple stone,

Absorbing glittering life-light

Sun-slippery, leaf-veined greenness –

 

To catch sunlight in my mouth

Taste its lemony warmth,

To follow a darting rabbit’s flight

And send peace, murmur peace after it

To hurl myself joyfully after a ball

To skitter and skid, slip, not fall

And still hold stillness,

Like water in a cup,

Unrippled, unruffled in

Surface and depth –

 

To give, and give away,

To forgive and sieve away

Grudges, rage, sadness, doubt,

To smile at insult,

And smile at praise,

To shrug at sorrow,

And forget tomorrow.

To gaze ahead, evaporating

As I move one, saturating

Myself with affection for

All that lives and moves,

Going from water to air

And air to water,

Repeating, escaping, returning

Over and over, and over, again.

Indifferent, but loving,

Detached, but attached.

Going from seed to tree,

And tree to flower,

From flower to seed,

And seed to earth,

And back to tree,

While lightning is

Poised to strike me

Where I stand.

 

And while I yearn,

Clamoring passionately,

For quietude and stillness,

The universe will

Expand forever, rippling outwards.

Before folding back,

Multi-petalled, tight

Like a fist, and finally

Return to its atomic self,

To its minute, all-seeing,

Inward-looking, quiet,

Turbulence-ignoring,

Life-making, seed-self.

 

And I will cease to yearn.

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