Did you fall or rise from
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Did you fall or rise from
The cloud of unknowing?
A spark of divine inspiration?
A phoenix-flame inside drops of rain?
Rain sings tonight.
Each drop holds a pear-shaped flame.
Paradrops fall to form fluent silk screens.
Did someone’s dying breath gift you
to inherit the memory of Keats,
one day to write your name in water
to gift another poet your breath?
You are more than blood – birth in a bowl.
You breathe holy secrets.
Pears fall from the sky.
Did you choose your parents?
(Or did they call you? Learn to sing your song?)
Were you present when Yahweh banished Gaia from divine grace
to subjugate women and nature to the will of men?
Fire and water marry their differences.
Or have you always lived when Gan Eden thrived –
a garden enlivened by diversity and friendship?
Lived in that dwelling well kept from any where,
ever in the when of all times
Rain and song leaf out.
Did you follow Socrates through Athens, learning to unravel
with a question all the reasons that oppress life?
When did we try to kill you?
And in killing you, kill ourselves?
Paradrops fall.
At sunrise, you are the giant peach surrounding
the rough ruby pit of you.
At sunset, you are the beating ruby pit, relinquishing
the juicy peach.
You are a paradox.
And what do you say to the five hundred millions of stars?
That seventy million old cells die as we sleep
and seventy million new cells are born?
That we perpetually evolve so best not judge?
A Chambered Nautilus Madonna holds you,
Her Child, a lit candle in the Whirlpool Galaxy
The cloud of unknowing?
A spark of divine inspiration?
A phoenix-flame inside drops of rain?
Rain sings tonight.
Each drop holds a pear-shaped flame.
Paradrops fall to form fluent silk screens.
Did someone’s dying breath gift you
to inherit the memory of Keats,
one day to write your name in water
to gift another poet your breath?
You are more than blood – birth in a bowl.
You breathe holy secrets.
Pears fall from the sky.
Did you choose your parents?
(Or did they call you? Learn to sing your song?)
Were you present when Yahweh banished Gaia from divine grace
to subjugate women and nature to the will of men?
Fire and water marry their differences.
Or have you always lived when Gan Eden thrived –
a garden enlivened by diversity and friendship?
Lived in that dwelling well kept from any where,
ever in the when of all times
Rain and song leaf out.
Did you follow Socrates through Athens, learning to unravel
with a question all the reasons that oppress life?
When did we try to kill you?
And in killing you, kill ourselves?
Paradrops fall.
At sunrise, you are the giant peach surrounding
the rough ruby pit of you.
At sunset, you are the beating ruby pit, relinquishing
the juicy peach.
You are a paradox.
And what do you say to the five hundred millions of stars?
That seventy million old cells die as we sleep
and seventy million new cells are born?
That we perpetually evolve so best not judge?
A Chambered Nautilus Madonna holds you,
Her Child, a lit candle in the Whirlpool Galaxy
M. Ann Reed is a contemplative scholar, poet, Chinese calligrapher-brush painter and professor of English Literature and Theory of Knowledge who has taught in Malaysia, Ukraine, Bosnia-Herzegovina, China and the USA. Her postdoctoral research studies the mending arts of Early Modern English and Contemporary Poetry. Her Chinese calligraphy and brush paintings have been exhibited in Portland, Oregon and at the Shenzhen Fine Arts Museum in China. Her poems have been published in various literary journals