One day
the peace of the earth
will fill my body.
I will know the river,
the roaring of the sea
and a calm green glade
where ferns wave softly
beneath towering cedars.
I will be the earth
and all her inheritance
from aeons past
through dim lit future
yet with gentle rain
falling in the valley
she tells me sweetly
that one day is now.

Surrendered to the morning,
the coming day with pressure to do,
I leave the night, the darkness
that wraps me in its blanket
and teaches in dreams.
To love the light, the touch
of spring rain on open leaf
is to join the green world
and all that’s rising
yet I remain in root,
following water down
through dark hollows
and coarse layers of stone
to the unerring food of silence.

photograph by Willard Walch

We can’t catch the dawn
or chase night to its safe retreat.
We face an incoming army,
troops of words like soldiers
marching across the once green land,
the music of poetry driven underground.
Their forces move in lock-step
as we withdraw into darkness
with stories of ancient times,
leaving behind the dry dust of logic,
a wasteland of abandoned dreams.
Who will remember the fires at midnight,
the heroics of song and verse?
We join with stone in the birthplace of water,
awaiting the earthquake of color
upon whose shattering tide
we will one day rise.

photograph by Jim Frid

When morning comes
light will change our dreams,
the thoughts, the images
of the self we’ve known
and free us to the open sky.
Every fingered bead
and candle lit
leads us to that moment.
The hour and the day
or who will be there
no one knows,
yet it will come
sure as sunrise,
written upon the morning.