Two awes

In awe of awes

1. In awe of clouds: my grandfather taught that clouds are the most powerful force on earth, the largest organism in the world, carrying oceans, rivers, lakes, rivulets. rains, snows, hailstorms, thunder, lightning and hurricanes in her body with the same ease.

2. In awe of hummingbirds: they are black in the shadows, they are red, red, carmines, yellows, green, verdant greens, in the sunlight, they are to the left and below, able to change directions in a heartbeating chain-reaction. Why doesn’t the hummingbird become diabetic ingesting nectars and sugars without regard? Why does the hummingbird return to my hands and stop time again and again?

3. In awe of mommas who have made human life since the beginning of time. Momma’s love is unbreakable, unimprisonable, the poem that cannot be stopped, life that gives life without end.

4. In awe of the kid next door, who practices shooting hoops every day after school and after dinner late into the night. He practices shooting the basketball into the basket and I see him playing for the Warriors or the Bulls or for the neighborhood team making us cheer for him whenever he shoots the ball.

5. In awe of our lungs: Our lungs are delicate and yet can extract oxygen from mountaintops and deserts, our lungs are the roots of the human tree, breathing in dead stars and breathing out human cosmos.

In awe of awe (2)

i am in awe
of chaos
under seige
of books
of art
of paper bleeding words
a chaos in geologic explosion
a fault-line that moves
1/16th of 1/16th of an inch
every hundred years
or every time I turn the page
My chaos is a portal
to enter
time moving forward
time moving backward
A page of time travel
one page I am in Stalingrad
surviving and battling the Nazis onslaught
one page I am in Tenochtitlan
forcing a god-man and his animal-slave up the temple steps
to extract the suns from their chests
one screaming in silent panic
the other kicking and resisting the obsidian offering
And now I am in the blackness
of Oakland
a man-child
unaware of the danger
surrounded by ancestral tenderness
this is my chaos
fractals of endless laughter and grief . . .

[July 6, 2020]