Song of the Trees, Voice of the River
Stillness Fragrance rises
in
a lazy curve
from a single stick of incense.
In
deep samadhi
I
hear the song of trees,
voice
of stones
“It’s
boring being a rock!
All
I do is sit around.
I
want to jump out of airplanes
and
swim the butterfly
in
an Olympic-sized pool.
I
wanna’ be a race car driver
or
a secret agent, drink vodka martinis,
and
seduce sexy women in Morocco.”
“What
I wouldn’t give to sit still like you,”
the
river’s voice Doppler shifts to baritone
as
he rushes away.
“Hey
baby! Hey baby! What you doing?”
a
magpie calls to a female.
“99
bottles of beer on the wall,”
sings
a eucalyptus, “99 bottles of beer…”
Twenty
years of meditation Twenty years
of
cold, monastery mornings
and
I stand eyebrow-to-eyebrow with Old Bodhidharma.
After
carefully untangling the tiny hairs
to
separate our foreheads,
I
see the disappointment on his bearded face.
“Me
too, buddy.” I pat his shoulder. “Me too.”
Jon Wesick
Jon Wesick is a regional
editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual.
He’s published
hundreds of poems and stories in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, New Verse News, Paterson
Literary Review, Pearl, Pirene’s Fountain, Slipstream, Space and Time, and Tales of the Talisman. The editors of Knot Magazine nominated his stories “The
Visitor” and “A Story for the Rest of Us” for Pushcart Prizes. His poem
“Meditation Instruction” won the Editor’s Choice Award in the 2016 Spirit First
Contest. Another poem “Bread and Circuses” won second place in the 2007 African
American Writers and Artists Contest. “Richard Feynman’s Commute” shared third
place in the 2017 Rhysling Award’s short poem category. Jon is the author of
the poetry collections Words of Power,
Dances of Freedom and A Foreigner Wherever I Go as well as several
novels and short story collections. His most recent novel is The Prague
Deception. http://jonwesick.com
Clever and fun.
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