If what keeps you up nights
are poets
make no mistake
you may be one,
if poetry
possibilities increase–
The one way to know
is let words
keep you awake
and never give you peace.
Photos by Rayn Roberts ’19
Category: Peace
The Danger of Transgender People
Why Transgender People are Dangerous
Never mind the roller coaster ride,
you’re on it now, can’t get off
It’s gravity’s got a terrible side
got nothing to do with God at all
God doesn’t really give a toss
if you die next week from a simple fall
God damn gravity that evil threat
Gonna getcha right soon, gonna getcha you bet
Not too sure why I stand at all
If I’m gonna get killed by a natural law
“Hells bells”, say I to the kids and wife,
“I’m takin’ to bed for the rest of my life!”
Understanding the Transgender Community
What is really Wrong: Violence Against & Murder of Transgender People.
Why Do We Need Science to Approve of Anyone Being Transgender?
The Problem Some Christians Have with Transgender People
Think Transgender People Themselves are in Danger? Well, yeah!
Spring is an Empire
Photos of Leaves and Trees by Rob Kashey.
A Truth You May Have Forgotten
There is a moment before the sound the Great Om,
Before Siva turned on one foot
Before Krishna was blue and Tara green,
Before the making of Lucifer, the heavenly war
The gravity of heaven and the drifting fire of hell
Before the holy breath blew into Man
Before Adam’s dream of Eve
Before Cain lost his mind and the daughters of Cain
And the flood, before an angel spoke to Hagar
And Moses saw a home of honey, fire and blood
Before David hurled a stone
Before Isaiah spoke a word
Before Buddha under the Bodhi-tree
The slaughter of the innocent
The cry of the desert in a voice crying in the desert
Before the sorrow of Mary
Before a nail cut the hand of the Anointed
Before the wonder of Magdalene at the tomb
Before tongues of fire
Before the first stone struck Stephen
Before stigmata in Assisi
Before Allah save infant girls
In a message of mercy from Mohammed
Before Gandhi felt the heat of a gun
And the death of Martin gave an undying dream
There is a moment
Without motion
Before the memory of time
Offered like sunlight filtered through trees falls at your feet
It is like sound
Or light surrounding the body
A lilting melody of light
Before evil or good were ideas, that when you hear
Clears the past of pain
Reconciles history to love
And the One you felt did not exist
Is with you saying
“I have always loved you and always will.”
It is the still point at the center,
That moment you truly are, that moment is now
On Mt. Sorak, Korea
I have seen them before like this
with the sky so close
it seems to touch
the glaze of ice and snow,
I have seen them
lifting limbs
as if to take and hold
a star on every branch,
but not in so odd a light:
lulled by wind
into a cold dream of sleep
as though the moon
conspired with the peaks
to shine nowhere else tonight
but here, to show
they are the stars
as they are the earth,
this one place
is all the universe
made brighter by the white birch.
On Mt. Sorak, Korea first printed in “Origins, Arrivals, Departures” 1995
Any Day Now
Nothing you were to think, feel, know, remains intact
The givens all gone, the body unravels
The soul does not exist: where spirit seemed to breathe
A great hole deepens, a sea of liquid sound spills in
Pure as God’s voice, moonlight-shoals and starry reefs
In vacancies of time too wide to navigate, the soul
A supreme fiction, a lost frame in an old film
Lightens out of being, a dream in pure color, sensation
Glittering the last hour, the lives that lived you
And left you to wonder, completely gone, directions
Collapse in light, light in all from all
Nothing to hold you, what you are dissolves in awe
A dreadful wonder of knowing all and nothing at all
But the jewel in the lotus, this, this moment.
Get a Grip
Easier it is to lift
a ten ton boulder
on a mountain
than to calmly sit
and put a collar
on an unruly mind.
Rayn Roberts 2017
