What My Ancestors Wrote

God is like the sun

a light too fierce to face 

so choose life

 

is unnamable

except by breath, wind, water,

 

roaring, whispering, seeking us 

in desert and fog, on the mountain,

through the eyes of the fox, 

 

and doe, through seasons of leaves

drunk on falling light, in the sometimes

howling wilderness of a solitary life

 

is the tree from which we eat

and should not, a knowing

rooted in division, the

 

belly of the whole, 

upper waters longing 

for the lower.

 

Community they wrote

is of God but not the essential

well of knowing and

 

unknowing which enters 

through the murmuring deep,

dwells in tented bodies

 

of a stiff necked people whom even the great

teacher, an intimate of Oneness 

struggled to know, to forgive. 

 

Elohim they wrote is the spilling red 

seeded pomegranate, echo 

and sounding of  distant bells

 

is entanglement, wrestling 

in dream, word, silence,

is the poem, song

 

written and unformed

calling through us

letter by letter,  to

 

we who are 

the hollow, flute, 

rock and cleft