Posts Tagged ‘Poetry’

Poetry Week

(This is really a response to Leslie, but the poem is so great, I am posting it here so others can easily read it.)

 

Leslie, we seem to be on the same wave length. Maybe it’s not unusual for people to become synchronistic when going through an intense program like the yoga teacher training we are engaged in. Is anyone else running down this road as well? Here’s my similar experience:

 

Tuesday, riding home from work on the Metro I was reading the American Poetry Review, specifically an untitled poem by Tadeusz Dabrowski (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones) on page 18:

 

“God has not retired – as Simone Weil

would have it – a huge distance away, but He’s

right here, so close that I can feel His

 

caring non-presence. (Which is a word passed over

in silence, an aborted gesture, a suspended

gaze,

 

            a breath held for a moment. That

 

not breathing, that’s your life.)”

 

Non-presence! Doesn’t that cut to the quick? The poem jerked me right off of the train out of the tunnel and into a much larger space. Isn’t it true that we forget to breath, that we forget our lives that we come to these inexplicable spaces where nothing and everything seems to be happening? Isn’t it true that one moment we wake up and realize we’ve not been breathing, not living, suspended somewhere other than with our bodily selves and the energy of life which surrounds and is us? Thanks be for awakening!