As I stand in the sunshine in the garden by the little shrine,

My Nonna’s little shrine of humble fig trees,

And look at the vast blue sky,

Endless scope of space and time
Encompassing the conscious and the unconscious with

The harmony of the physical world

It’s croaks and chirps, squeals and squeaks

Held still beneath the sunshine

 

And when, as the wind whistles softly through the air,

A flutter of wings, so delicately merged

With the isolated wilderness around me

And I look up:

An indigo flame blurred against the pale sky,

Her back inked with black defense,

The legs flitting through my hair, where she lands,

Our souls one

 

You are here! You are here! I have found you!

Everywhere

At once you become the sky, the wind, the trees

Freeing me from the awful demands of consciousness

Free of demands and responsibilities,

Of pain and struggle

An immediate, felt reality rather than a

Yearning, yearning for peace and security

 

For you are here, now

And leave my hair only too soon so that

I want to cry out, “Come back!”

She dances around my empty hand,

The magic of the moment stretching my lips from cheek to cheek

Until she lands nimbly on a dangling fig leaf

And her gaze holds me,

Close, and it enfolds me, touches me

 

With feelings that change and quiver,

I sought to escape from the demanding liberation that is

Life in all its glory

Our dependencies of death and desires for

Experience that is unconscious, unreal, unliving,

An oblivion of uttermost living

She is there for release, for just one moment

And then gone

 

My perfect state of harmony left bittersweet,

I touch the leaf where she last sat,

Thriving in me the grievous feelings which

Death has brought

Its power lifted from me for just one moment

And I possess my own soul in the strength within me

The deep, rich aloneness, deep and alone

A sanctuary of darkness fooled by the sky’s light

 

Then I watched from the depths of my heart

Her wings, as elegant as they were in life,

Beating the wind beneath them as she soared through eternity

Into the endless scope of space and time

A harmonic lullaby of wind and trees and birds,

All beneath the sky as she

Journeys a long, long journey to the

Sweet home of isolated light above

 

So far away from our darkness below, as I

Stand alone once more in the garden by the little shrine,

Where my Nonna once stood, and the serenity

Of her spirit wavering in my heart like water thrilled with light

My aggressive declaration against death no longer needed

For in the sparkling rays on the fig trees

Dance the shadows of the mystical creatures that

Nature calls butterflies