Having Nothing

Whatever comes, comes from a need,

a sore distress, a hurting want.

Mary's pain made the baby Jesus.

Her womb opened its lips

and spoke the Word.

Every part of you has a secret language.

Your hands and your feet say what you have done.

Every need brings in what's needed.

Pain bears its cure like a child.

Having nothing produces provisions.

Ask a difficult question,

and the marvelous answer appears.

Build a ship, and there will be water

to float it. The tender-throated infant cries,

 and milk drips from the mother's breast.

Be thirsty for the ultimate water.

Then be ready for what will come

pouring from the spring.

The Nightingale's Way

A bird delegation comes to Solomon

complaining, Why is it

you never criticise the nightingale?

Because my way, the nightingale explains

for Solomon, is different.

Mid-March to mid-June I sing.

The other nine months,

while you continue chirping,

I am silent.

Some Song or Something

Birdsong brings relief

to my longing.

I am just as ecstatic as they are,

but with nothing to say.

Please, universal soul, practice

some song, or something, through me.

My First Love Story

The minute I heard my first love story

I started looking for you,

not knowing how blind that was.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.

They are in each other all along.

The Pickaxe (2)

This is a rented house.

You do not own the deed.

You have a lease, and you have set up

a little shop where you barely make a living

sewing patches on torn clothing.

Yet only a few feet underneath

are two veins, pure red and bright gold carnelian.

Quick. Take the pickaxe and pry the foundation.

You have got to quit this seamstress work.

What does the patch-sewing mean, you ask.

Eating and drinking. The heavy cloak

of the body is always getting torn.

You patch it with food

and other restless ego-satisfactions.

Rip up one board from the floor

and look into the basement.

You may see two glints in the dirt.

The Pickaxe (1)

Lawrence Alma-Tadema's Spring

Some commentary on I was a hidden treasure,

and I desired to be known.

Tear down this house.

A hundred thousand new houses can be built

from the transparent yellow carnelian

buried beneath it, and the only way to get to that

is to do the work of demolition,

and then the digging beneath the foundation.

With that value in hand all the new construction

will be done without effort. And anyway, sooner or later,

the house will fall on its own.

The jewel treasure will be uncovered,

but it will not be yours then.

The buried wealth is your pay

for doing the demolition,

the pick and shovel work.

If you wait and just let it happen,

you will bite your hand and say,

I did not do as I knew I should have.

The Lord of Beauty

The lord of beauty enters the soul

as a man walks into an orchard in spring.

Come into me that way again.

Like a fresh idea in an artist's mind,

you fashion things before they come into being.

You sweep the floor like the man

who keeps the doorway.

When you brush a form clean,

it becomes what it truly is.

You guard your silence perfectly

like a waterbag that does not leak.

You live where Shams lives,

because your heart-donkey

was strong enough to take you there.