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HOW TO LOCATE AND PIN DOWN OUR MORTALITY

How to locate and pin down our mortality exactly
with all its desperate
  poignancy, at any particular

moment but also overall, like

carving away the space around us, all the
inessentials, as Giacometti did with his
walking figure sculptures until tall thin blades of
selves were all that remained
staring forward in timelessness,

the very seatedness with consciousness we are
with flowing things going through us either from
right to left, left to right, or from either inside us
out or outside us in, so that we’re,

as we’ve always suspected, conduits, vessels, big
flesh flutes for often faraway music, stratospheric symphony
tapered down note by note to these
human utterances carved into plain speech and
attitude, hoarse arrogance of being or
gentle voice of submission in the
greater cascade vaster than we could
ever hope to be, each

tick and forward motion of ours
lurching stumblingly
or striding confidently in
God’s warm Presence, or

jerking hopelessly in the dankness of
dungeons, inhospitable place,
in constant danger in an alien universe,

each of our personal universes with its
personal Lord out of the One God, facets
flashing in our direction through which we behold

passing clouds of visceral love either bright
white against bright sky blue
or always burgeoning with scorch lightning,

so sensitive and vulnerable are we to all its
      variable weathers!

The heartbeat central, and what’s
in the heart, either a bronzed
native holding out sweetmeats on a
floating tray of sweet flowers
or a miser clenching the nothing that he
owns to himself in a
continual state of hectic anxiety,

and the eyes of the heart that look on the
world, this sinewy thread of light that expands to
a rushing Nile of animated materiality—

ah, we can never be defined by ourselves alone!

There’s an environment of coloration and
effectiveness with us until we’re

dead, then everything collapses into our mortal
shell and the
opening for us to walk through takes place
elsewhere where we go,
door swinging open in
non-space, with the

agile equations of all the actions of our present
mortality laid out before us on
non-magical tables, vividly

present to us, irrefutable, but covered with

mercy as we conceive of it,
and covered as well with the

very inconceivable bath of mercy
in which our entire
mortality is actually submerged
in all its tiniest motions.

And our faces will then
radiate joy.               

Please visit Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moores wonderful website at www.danielmoorepoetry.com