Just a couple of days ago I unearthed a poem I wrote a few years ago that I had forgotten about. Then tonight I received an email that sent me searching for some way to describe what my response was to the words I received, and there it was waiting for me to send out, this poem.

Walk With What You Are Given

Walk with what you are given.  See it plainly.  Pare it to the simplest core.  Red apples on the tree of desire.  Eve’s open mouth, tasting.  The snake coiled in her belly.  Paradise.

To see, means getting kicked out of the garden.  Naked.  No garments to rent asunder.  Walking that red clay road.  Crows cawing on the top limbs.  Eagles looking for land.  Fish out of water.  Once you leave that garden everything is up for grabs. To see it plainly one must move through the world like a blind person.  Do not hold on to what is before your eyes.  Let it all be illusion.  Smoke.  Mirrors.  Walk proudly out of that garden.  Out of your corseted, safe, don’t look me in the eyes harbor of shame.  Stumble and fumble and bumble your way out of that garden, that first living place.  Notice the minutest of incidences.  The color of the sky when a robin sings.  A fish walking on land.  Corn growing.  The whinny of a horse.  The moans, grunts, hisses, squeaks, gurgles.  The cooing.  

Let THESE words be your first prayer:   Let me be lost.  Let me be dumb.  Let me stumble into my moments with open arms. Put out my eyes. Let me embrace this blindness. Let me walk the red earth, the black soil, the fertile loam.  Let me cut a swatch through a field of tasseled wheat.  Let me seek out the fruit.  The fat blackberries coiled up in rows.  Red raspberries on their thorny thrones.  Let me falter.  Let me stop a million times to remember Eve.  Remember my place, which is nowhere, which is everywhere.

Suki 2006