micheleHALL

When no one notices

it rains love.

When the sky is thick with stars

Or shrouded in cloud

It rains love.

Like a house spellbound with a sleeping child

The air is thick

The gardens wait breathlessly

The shadowed streets

The silent ancient trees

All infused in soft night air.

 

At last the world arises

But caught in the momentum of another day

Never noticing

We are unaware

Of blessings given by the loving skies.

 

And so, I too,

Have not noticed how much I am loved

Or that I’ve been given gifts

Beyond my deserving.

I stutter and stumble through my days

Ignorant that love was embedded and flows from my fingers

while making a bed

Or planting flowers

Writing a poem

Or confessing to a friend

Love oozes from me like sweet sweat

For I am an expression of life loving the world.

As a child

You knew the language of the sun

listened to the songs of flowers

And studied the musings of mushrooms

You overheard the clash of man and woman

Thrown against each other on this muddy ball

And your soul was cut

As deep as a slave’s back.

 

You searched for beauty

finding it intermittently

in raindrops

When a burst of sun

Hit the prison rooftops.

You hungered for truth

Weeping at the discovery of celestial music

Then got lost choking on the arsenic of despair.

 

But please, my beloved

don’t take your sensitivity to heart

Thinking you are unique.

You’ve had it wrong all these years

You were given heart

And voice

Meat and blood

Because you were designed to pick up the signals

of distant planets

And microscopic loves

You were sent to translate the radio waves of wonder and worry

into poems

And songs

And scribblings

And music.

Your belonging is the way

That the desert blooms.

The universe sees no need to be pragmatic
The gods, against all odds
Created 400,000 types of flowers
Seeing no good reason to stop at daisies
But went on in a florid manner
Affirming the irrationality of irises here
And the intimacy of lilies there
They threw in the splash of Azaleas 
Added the musky charm of roses
The fragile pointillism of baby’s breath
And the flagrant lavishness of orchids
Even hominoid shaped cacti surprise us after the rains
With skin soft petals blooming amidst the spines

 

And the bounty continues:
Thirty million insect types
Of every shape and colour
Sting or stalk
Buzz and walk
The leafy praying mantis
The fat bummed honey bee
It is a cornucopia of magnificence
An unruly love of extravagance
That begets
Ten thousand kinds of sponges
Eight thousand reptiles
From frog to snake to crocodile
Who hop and slither their toothy smile
No matter what phobia you fear
Spider beings display eighty thousand forms 
And mollusk kinds outnumber us in swarms
No Zen simplicity
For mother mud
She does both salty seas and fleshy blood
Fixated on embellishment and ornamentation 
She does everything in immoderation.

 

So why my friend
Do you argue so seriously 
For your one god
Who with a nod, imperiously
Authored a piffling single book
Used ever since as a grappling hook
And brought nothing but confusion
To guide us on this planet of riotous profusion?