Poem by RELEE: Prelude

Beginnings have no beginnings. Endings
do not end. Fragments. Shards of childhood thrown
against a door. A prayer to a god
who isn't there. Words stutter against
this void, shatter the silence, and yet
the silence is all that speaks, can speak,
all that can or shall be heard. Voices haunt
these shores. In woods along a path strewn
with debris of woods, an old man, I read
to a lost boy. It is not too late
even there in that disturbed innocence....
Time yet to consider....Time, still time....
I resort to memory which is sorrow, which
brings in mind that cuts and severs. All
I have is this wordless wood in this mist
on a crisp December morning. The brittle
leaves crack and crackle in the morning chill.
I hear them fall, hear them knock against
one another as they fall. I hear
an almost silent call of morning dove,
the answering call of stellar jay.
The woods creates itself moment by moment.
Fragments of forests that never disappear.
A dark brown path of shredded bark, eucalyptus
berries, twigs, curling leaves. Water forms at
the tips of pine needles, collects, spills off
into the light. Glistening puffballs are
entwined by strands of spidery threads. How
to say this? How to say it even as
I fold into what I see and lose the words
to say it? I walk in this place. I shape
it as I walk. And I am shaped by it.
I watch where I am walking. I watch me
watching and know that what is occurring
is occurring with no one watching. I have
moved into a country created by woods
and sounds of traffic, sounds of air, fragments
joined to form an endless form. This man that
I am shrinks into particles of dust.
He is not. He watches and knows all that
he knows as he watches. Recognizes
himself as who he is. In one translucent
second, in one overwhelming flash of time
he is gone into what he sees. There is no
duplicity in this. There are not
two events in the geography of
a morning walk. He is where he walks
and he is what he sees. He is a path
in a city woods. He knows it all more
intimately than thought can say it. And
this is what a child should have known, perhaps
in one flicker of time did know and now tries
to recapture. But now he is successful.
A child should have known as it raced the city
streets of its home, killed and mocked the mocker
of its growing. But now I am silent
again and move into silence, disappear
into a figure on a walk. It is light.
Morning. Here where there is no age. Just leaves
falling. A scene where silence is seen,
where one is one and only one.

"...Atman...has been there
always from the very beginning
if there was any beginning. And
it is going to the very end, if
there is going to be any end...."

- Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh