Freed from the Underground
Email william2fday@yahoo.com
Bill_Day
Selected Poems from Search Books
Winter seemed sudden this year.
The surprising morning whiteness
Blanketed my memory of autumn.
The brightness is so shocking,
And yet, signs, signifying its imminence,
Were all around me:
Glow of night clouds,
Slow dance of bare trees,
Fallen dry leaves,
Brown ground.
Why had I not expected it?
Was it the fall filled
Talking and touching
Late at night and early morning in bed
Which so distracted me from the dying and dead?
Awakening,
Feeling the stillness,
Sensing the change,
By myself, alone.
Sharp sounds of life muted now
Should have prepared me for this thick white awareness.
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Humming wings
Carrying a heavy load-
Not flapping of wings
But the unconscious drone,
An instinctive will,
To fly from flower to flower,
Tasting and sustaining….
-----------------------------------------------------
Lighted by the bright silvery light
of a full moon
Shadows follow late fallen leaves
Across an encrusted snow field
With a freedom……?
At the whim and mercy of the wind-
Directed by physical phenomenon and fate?
Well, maybe, yes,
A freedom only a few
Will ever experience or yet escape.
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Thanks to Steve
By looking into a mountain lake
I began to know you,
A new possibility of awareness.
A trout
Motionless
Ready to feed.
Rocky bottom
With variant green mosses.
I stare
Knowing I am within.
Reaching out
I touch.
Ripples float outward
But you remain still.
The door opens without movement
And the outside is seen inside.
My body
Falls through the keyhole
Exploding
On the other side.
Intellectualizing causes the door to close.
Without
You are here
Within
To reach again.
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I
A leaf blown from a tree
Falls gently to the ground.
Life seeps from its pores
Until it's earth,
But in its life
It breathed and sustained....
And yet, still sustains life.
II
A bubble rides with the brook;
Gusts of wind pressure
Until
Exploding
The stream, itself,
Feeds.
III
A fish carried down stream,
Momentarily standstill
Then darts upstream
To an insect caught in the eddies.
IV
For a moment his mind drifts in its own thoughts,
Until familiar chords catch him.
He becomes music and
Lifts his instrument
To play.
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I
Clouds rains;
Rivulets form;
Young streams flow;
Old rivers slow;
Before
Becoming
One
With ocean.
All is change.
All returns?
What’s our immortal substance
Which remains?
II
Life itself is an essence,
A part of our sustenance of being.
Life feeds us;
Water feeds the stream.
------------------------------------------------
An individual entity
With individual beauty,
But look too closely
And everything is temporal, indeterminate, and chaotic.
Look from too far a distance
And everything is but a speck in a vast emptiness.
Sit back,
Relax,
And everything falls into its rightful place.
We are part of it All.
------------------------------------------------------------
I
Our land, our lives, life and the land:
Who can deny the sacrednesses of these vessels?
Who can stand separate from these miracles:
Who can get lost not knowing?
Destruction can not destroy their sacredness.
Death does not separate us from the essences,
Ignorance does not diminish truths.
We know,
Only sometimes don't see:
II
It is as senseless as
A blade of grass bending in the wind
And yet all things sing
One.
It is as meaningful as
A blade of grass,
And yet even that dies.
We sing with the All
And we sing alone.
We are separated
And yet inseparatable.
Knowing these things,
We need not worry about this path.
