A fuller awakening

Hello friends, that great gray poet, Walt Whitman, knew that all things were connected in a cosmic unity. As one ages  the realization that unity has been there all along can lead to deeper reserves of love and inner strength. Even a sleeping cat expresses the universal balance of form and being in all things. This poem I wrote in 2019 is even more resonant today in my 92nd year. Beauty that we find in a flower may disappear in an hour, but the continued renewal of the life force is truly the journey-work of stars. Best, Gene.

 

Beauty Tenuous (after Whitman)

‘I believe a work of grass is no less
than the journey-work of the stars.”
(Walt Whitman)

With brother George’s recent death
and my eighty-ninth birthday,
I dwell in borrowed time.

How best live my final phase?
I’d like to wake up each day aware
of some corner of the Golden Rule,

without ambition to right all wrongs,
holding grateful for past blessings,
and daily love of Peggy and friends.

A fuller awakening seems to emerge,
an awareness of new voices,
among ordinary things,

sitting with cat Tony on the porch
receiving morning sun on leaves,
birds visiting, sounding, going,

the cosmos unfolding in every bud and flower,
in every mot juste, beauty tenuous, eternal,
felt in fatigue, pain, joy, all unfinished.