Archive for the ‘Catalyst2’ Category

2011-10-03 – At Colette’s

Sunday, October 2nd, 2011

An October night in a house laced with moonlight
with a good friend asleep in one room
and my lover and partner asleep in another.

I realize, yet, again,
what lucky man I am in this life.

Marriages lost, earthquakes come and gone,
hearts repaired and small fortunes lost.
And none of it touches me
as I walk through these moon-washed rooms.

The Beloved loves the child
that stands into the wind
and dares to dare.

The child that says,
“Bring it on, Beloved. hold me
to the breast of this life
with all it has to give.”

Break my heart and storm my sanity
and I will still believe you to be the Beloved,
believe you to be compassion and light;
even as I prepare myself to pass over and die.

I had prayed for lightening
even though I might be destroyed.
And then I walked, some months later,
through this house laced with moonlight.

And I see here the proof that I am loved
and the proof that fear
is just the way we delay experience.

I see that, even as I die,
I will drink this cup to the end
and walk into the storm
and feel the rain and praise the giver
and know that I am a blessed child.

gallagher
03Oct2011

2013-08-30 – Parc Monceau

Friday, August 30th, 2013
 
I feel my legs creaking as age steals up upon me
   and, when I walk in the park, I know the ground waits below me.

All my health, lovers, adventures, years and successes 
   are just chaff in the winds of these many lives I've lived.

I sit near the still point and feel the simple knowing
   that ebbs and seeps from there.

The old men with money and power and the tiny tots
   with their little plastic sunglasses are all one to me now.

Love and being, here and now, and the leaves 
   that fall from the trees, they all whisper 'freedom and bliss' to me.

I look, and the urge to grasp rises, 
   but I say 'No'.
Each thing and moment, each coming and going is,
   in itself, perfect.

Buddha smiles someplace in this moment and in no other
   and whatever purpose is, and has been, is always now.

The ground waits beneath me and I hear its murmuring
   and I wait, pleased, for what is and what will be.

The world is magic that there can be such peace here
   in the midst of so much pain and war and evil.

gallagher
30 Aug 2013 - Paris, France

— Copyright 1965-2014 by Dennis Gallagher —

2014-09-14 – The Silver Birch

Sunday, September 14th, 2014
 
Light and shadow ... moving time,
life here - bursting from inanimate matter.

A small pool or mirror, I.

Colette told me that the buds on her White Birch tree
were just coming out
when she went in to have her first child.

And that, when she returned some days later,
with a new life in her arms,
the buds had turned to flowers.

And every year since, she and this tree have communed
in the memory of that day.

Such stories run in the literature I've read
and through the memories in my mind.

Stories of people whose entire lives were written 
within the seasons of the land they lived on.

Their lives rising and falling, rising and falling
through the eternal sunrises and sunsets
that swept across the fields they tended.

There were children born there
that played beneath those trees.

And they arose, lived and then became 
just the memories 
of those who live there now.
Now, amid the relentless turning 
of these endless years.

Our faces are growing older 
and fading in the mirrors now
as we witness all of this
again and again.

I grow more like a reflecting pool 
and less like a believer
as I look at all of those I love in this life
transiting through this life
and I see them, and I see all of us, 
as just passing through this place
like curtains in the wind.

Just living pools, reflecting ...
and mirrors of awareness, hoping ...

We are those, who realize, 
only towards the end of at all, if at all,
that we are the transient ones
on this stage of mystery.

gallagher
14Sep2014
Christchurch

— Copyright 1965-2014 by Dennis Gallagher —