Alan Drengson, 1979, LightStar Press, Victoria BC
Spiders in the Sun: Indra’s Net
Coyote Times
It Just Goes On…
Wildness There
Spiders in the Sun: Indra’s Net
One day
sun rose red
chased night away.
Day shine
spiders sway
rainbow webs glisten.
Water lenses
sun reflecting spheres
mirrors of universes.
Mandala dews,
each sun caught, flares
against background blues.
Widow spins webs
fixes flies to feed her young
when she is dead.
Perfect days
time stop, no haze.
Hey, spiders in the sun!
Coyote Times
Coyote, wilderness crier
still howls on the brink of the hill.
She sees her future in the city,
in the lights and noise below.
In a vertical slice of time,
the journeys are simultaneous;
a symphony of the whole,
a chorus of the parts in total time.
We hear all times in this lonesome song;
their calls will never cease.
They are continuous with all the nights
that are gathered
in this one sound.
It Just Goes On…
In the middle of the clearing,
in the middle of the song,
we pause to hear the echoes
of our moving chorus
grow faint in reverberation.
At the bottom of the breath,
at the bottom of the well,
a silence, a gap where flowers open;
the pointed petals swell
with ten thousand moving charms,
a fan of arms against white.
Life moves at a walk;
and although paces vary
no one is left behind.
In the middle of the clearing,
in the middle of the song
our sacred journey
just goes on.
Wildness There
Blue flower, sidewalk crack,
delicate, but rooted there.
Blooms for weeks,
trumpet speaks above the din
of passing feet.
A fragment sky catches the eye
amidst the night’s debris;
waits for a bee carrying pollen
from a relative by the sea.
Lamppost showy baskets,
cultivated embers
of a gardener’s sigh;
they pull at us as we pass by.
We clap for their display, but
we cheer for wildness
seemed gone astray—
the blue flower’s patient ways.
Sidewalk fragments,
pieces of sky, grow to sand;
a city passes by.
Flowers stride buildings,
gardens hang in air;
Babylon, Athens, Rome are there
pushing up flowers
and giving off wild seeds…