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Principles of duty

overtaking sleep like a wave.

Heavy love rooted in isolation,

reflecting the depths of true giving.

A condition turns to disease, restrictions

bare down. What is ordinary becomes like

a cage. Children in the drifting storm, drifting

on condensed-traffic streets, how I love you.

How I would do everything I cannot do to ease

the grip of your elephant shackles. Mine was the angel’s

autonomy, where nothing was miscellaneous and my bed

was a rich blackness that absorbed all time. Mine was loud

without noise or distraction, just the buoyant sparkle flow

of paired-off stars and the countless debris of ongoing creation.

Mine is yours now, inside less-than-working-organs, kidneys

like puzzle pieces, seamed together by an amateur.

Where are you now, God-who-remembers, reminds me

of what I once was? My God and Jesus of the lilies,

why the children? Why this fluke,

this bizarre nightmare crawling, closer,

closer than when I had no body, no loves to look after?

And oh I am tired, worn as an old shoe that must keep

the broken glass at bay. Where are you my God, my Jesus?

I know you are here. I know something, but not enough

to deflate my bloating anxiety. It is grief all over again and I

hide myself in older hands, friendless, unsupported, remembering

the wholeness in every flaw, in the universe’s veined light

I once travelled on. Remembering that what is flawed sparkles

with a unique variation of beauty, rainbow fractions, infractions

that are blessings that seep and saturate sinews

and bones, galaxies

perpetual, renewable

where everything sings useful –

seemingly incongruent, yet in truth, masterfully

precise.

….

 Copyright © 2014 by Allison Grayhurst (poem and images)

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Copyright © by Allison Grayhurst 2014

amazon.com/author/allisongrayhurst

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First published in “The Muse – An International Journal of Poetry” Volume 4, Number 1, June Issue 2014

http://themuse.webs.com/June%202014/muse%20june%2014.pdf

http://themuse.webs.com/latestissues.htm

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You can listen to the poem below:

In response to the poem – Walkways:

“This is brilliant! Brilliant. Reminds me of when I first read Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”. And I wanted to stand up on the city bus and exclaim aloud: “Listen to this!” A comprehensive capturing of human earthly experience in all its dimensions without missing a beat – beyond the conscious mind – dancing with the levels of our knowing and sensing – that we feel but do not always recognize, and rarely, oh so rarely articulate. Clearly, Grayhurst’s poetic journey has taken her to the mountain top,” Taylor Jane Green, registered holistic talk therapist and author..

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