No Zen

No Zen

There is a madness in me

That will not be content

Though I know the depth of

Feeling others have for me

Giving their love to me

Body and soul

Holding me with fingers of compassion 

Landscapes give me peace

Ocean waves breaking or mountains in mist

Autumn trees rising above a waterfall

There I am momentarily at peace

Yet with those I love

I am restless all night

Beating nightmare fists into pillows

 My yearning is my wisdom though it annihilate me

The smile of the Zen master my distant landscape

Shakespeare's Sonnet 116

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

    William Shakespeare 

Stars of the Firmament

As if from heaven come

The compassionate ones

Buddha Jesus Gandhi King

Spreading wisdom like so much

Seed flowing out upon us

No solipsists they

Pure selfless love of humanity

Dying from food from the beggar bowl

Or from torture or from gun shot

Did they die for us

Washing with their blood

Our singular selfish souls

Whatever their vision their wisdom

They too had individual passion

Buddha was Siddhartha husband and father

It is what he gave up that holds him

In our imagination

So too Jesus whose private loves 

We can only surmise

John Mary Lazarus
Gandhi with his nieces

King with his lovers

What compassion was not

Begot by love in the flesh 

Jack 11/11/11