A poem: Súplica

Many years without truly sharing my poetry with anybody, due to fears…the poetry writing muscles have become rusty at best. Poems used to be almost a way of speaking between me and many of my friends, and I consider myself lucky to have had friends for whom this was also true. I started writing in the D.R. around the time when I was 13. I slowly stopped after my return to the US, after completing Peace Corps service. The voice died.

I didn’t want to speak/write anymore and hear myself mostly bitter, angry…I didn’t want my feelings/thoughts to be corrected because I wrote with an accent. But I guess, more than anything, I didn’t want to experience the cold silence of someone reading the words that had come from my heart, and having nothing to say to me, or worse, nothing to share. It felt very lonely…I had seemingly landed in an environment (academia) within a culture where words related to feelings were considered sappy, mushy, non-accurate, weak

However, my own silence is apparently meant to be broken, or at least be punctured by whispers from this heart perhaps poorly carried by these words.

[Written during the Harvest of Peace celebration…a rusty effort perhaps, but a sincere feeling…I guess, this speaks to a kind of yearning…I was afraid of sharing this poem…therefore, here it is.]

Súplica

O Teacher come and let me know that it is your voice that I hear.

Teach me to listen to all of life as carrying the whisper of the Teachings,

the comfort to all my tears.

O Teacher come…I am foolish and I am blind.

With this human, frail and mortal body possessed just by human sight

I can’t always tell the difference between the shadows and the Light.

O Teacher come…

Let me feel the smell of fire and water, wind and sand…

Let me sense your presence in decay, rocks, wood and rust…

Help me know that with these scents, your sweet perfume is close behind…

O Teacher come as lover, teacher, healer, food and wine.

Let me taste your lips, kiss your feet,

embrace the body though which the Dharma courses,

the Mirror through which all perceptions change

And without worldly efforts, become Divine.

 Rita