Sad to see the Buddhist Poetry Review go dark. Here is one of my poems that had been published there. It’s Emily Johns’s favorite, which we often use in our Work That Reconnects workshops. Note, the text works much better on a tablet, or with a bigger screen’s window fairly narrow, for the formatting’s sake.
Evening primrose
A biennial,
the evening primrose lives
its first year as
a basal whorl,
hovering
close to the ground, hiding
under the taller summer weeds.
Wintering over, it waits for warmth,
then sends up tall stalks that bloom and bloom and
set more and more seedpods along its lengthening stems.
This weed opens its flower at dusk,
shines for the moon, and closes at dawn.
It bears seeds in upright,
open-topped pods,
easily shaken into the palm.
That year, 2002, I prayed for healing
every morning: with low-lidded gaze through the window
towards the garden, I bowed to my flowers with the sun.
Seeing the world as we knew it
begin to collapse slowly, like
the first moments of the twin towers’
melting floor by floor,
I resolved to rely
more on spirit than substance,
and tried to wean
myself from the medications
a decaying civilization is unlikely
to continue to provide.
One medicine stubbornly held on to me:
evening primrose oil.
Whenever I stopped taking the capsules,
my illness would return.
I kept praying: may I be healthy, may you be healthy,
may all beings know peace.
That summer evening primrose appeared in my garden,
somehow overlooked while weeding the fall before.
Sweet yellow flowers slowly folded closed
as the sun rose.
Where I, too, bowed
to the rising sun each morning,
the evening primrose had sown itself
seasons before I had begun to pray.
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