BURNING THE PRAYER FLAGS

On a sparkling morning after night rain
the new year begins with blessings:
Thank you grass for softening the San Gabriels,
and sparrows for picking strands from our flags,
adding color and bits of prayer to your nests,
and wind for casting joyful wishes that we need.
And thank you poems, the sitting for them, the waiting,
the writing, for bringing the simple facts of feelings
and awareness that have settled in or bubbled up
or smashed into consciousness
like suffering or joy:  each time the teaching is the same:
to experience and let go, to experience and let go.  So what

if I have not accomplished what I set out to do ...
it is an illusion that I am superior to the conditions.
We are born into a life not of our making
and fall into pride or loathing about who we seem to be,
then possibly we wake to the larger view
and release who we seem to be
and simply live in joy when we can.

When the wind draws them out these blessings
printed on colored cloth go eastward
to the desert in the name of the earth,
the water, the air, the fire, the space.
They send compassion, and love, and equanimity, and joy.
And when there is no spirit wind we look hard
to find these things in our inner landscape.
Do you imagine fame and riches are more than that?

We thank the flags and consign them to the fire.
We bless and put up new ones.  The prayers
don’t change, but the cloth is tattered from work.
Birds have picked at them.  The sun has aged them.
We put up new ones because we are human
and believe there is magic connecting our deepest hope
to the simple fact of new bright cloth.

2/9/19, Altadena