Lotus in Muddy Water
When the Brokenness Vanishes Before Your Very Eyes
It isn’t what they told you, a chip broken from the hip bone
or splinter in your finger that can never be removed. Healing
comes before your very eyes, whether or not you’re watching
at times. You can’t find what’s broken in the falling-down house
of the body that is actually upright enough to live in most days.
The old or the new can vanish, leaving you amazed as you sit
on a chair on the sidewalk, letting the sun and wind sideways shower
you clear. Even the girl you are, fire to fire, in the morrow of your bones,
can sit up unfettered on her colt legs and take your hand, telling you,
“Look, it doesn’t hurt anymore.” Even the oldest woman you will be
can come to the other side of you, lean her forearm, still muscular
under all the age, on your right shoulder and nod, her eyes
your most beautiful eyes.
The loved or unloved ones long gone cannot grip weapons anymore,
and the ones still here will lose interest eventually. It’s how the seasons
land in each future glimpsed. The pregnant woman you were can put
her feet up, exhale, and laugh at the thousands of mosquito worries.
The father or mother, the brother who never said much, the best teacher
or worst friend sing the chorus they don’t even know they’re singing,
all of you too, about what life does to scars and breaks, what’s lost
or embedding in us. It is simply the song of breath, making mundane
the unimaginable, turning to light whatever weight or lost trails
you thought was always. No, what is always is how the bone regenerates
itself, the splinter slips out over time, the dog returns home, the bad father
begs forgiveness, the old dreams lifts its chest, spreads its arms
and gathers all of you up in whatever remnant of it glows still.