The Roots of Caring
If we could see the truth that’s always there,
We’d all become kind pacifists. We’d care.
We’d need reminders daily. If we’d dare.
Death
It’s the “undiscovered country” Shakespeare said,
“No traveler returns.” They can’t. They’re dead!
So, will we end up on some heavenly cloud,
And play those harps (But always, not too loud!)?
Or when the bod shuts down at last one day,
Does consciousness itself just go away?
Or will there be another sort of birth?
To learn some further lessons here on earth?
Or does awareness go right on, perfected?
There, but not at all like we expected?
I took a course in ancient history,
Where we were taught, it is no mystery,
Religion’s origins, and where they all do lie:
It’s all about what happens when we die.
Jesus didn’t talk on death as such,
But diverted our attention pretty much,
To things that then were not so much in fashion,
Like kindness, equanimity, compassion,
And he knew that if we just sat quietly,
There’d be no diff twixt God, and you, and me.
And when we get for sure all of the latter,
What happens after death, it just don’t matter.
Zazen
Sit still and quiet every single day,
With no agenda, as they’re prone to say,
Not preferring storm to blessed peace,
No equanimity. And never an increase.
It’s just that it’s already there,
It does not vanish in the air,
And when we get that it is very true,
It’s all the rest of life, then, for us too.
Still we return and formally we sit,
Not for ourselves, (oh, maybe just a bit),
Its for the ones we love so much, forsooth,
May sentient beings all come to know the truth.
My Aunt and Uncle
A fortune teller once
Told my grandmother
She would have
Five blue-eyed boys.
This came true.
My uncle Norman was
The second of them.
My father was the third.
We lived a few blocks
From my aunt and uncle
For many years.
No one would guess him
To be the longest-lived
Of the original five O’Neal boys,
But that’s the way it went.
He and my aunt were ultimately
Married more than seventy years.
They probably couldn’t remember
What life felt like not married to each other.
Their descendants were mostly
A disappointment to them
But they’d not had the New Deal,
Like their parents did.
They loved them anyway.
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