Actuality

Actuality

Aside from ideas
About what suns are,
What turns…
How it all works,
An actual sunrise
Touches the treetops
In golden light.

This is a miracle of refraction
Performed without
Knowing the word
Yet pouring like a clear stream
From the heart of itself
Golden and radiant.

Noticing this,
Seeing what this is,
This sunrise touches–
Brings attention to–
The actuality here,
So often hidden, but always
The seed in the core
Of this human life,
Housed in flesh, yet
Not confined thus,
Remaining radiant and
Golden as sunrise.

Behind all ideas of who
Watches the sun coming
And sprinkles words on paper
Calling them poetry,
The actuality of the morning
Infuses what it touches
With something quite else,
Something wonderous.
This fleshy bundle…
A miracle in itself,
But what it houses!
What it houses!

This actuality finds itself
In each ordinary life, and
In the fading stars, the rising orb,
The birdsong
Amongst the tangled shrubbery–
In every single thing.

Oh, miracle beyond knowing
I am returned again to actuality
By your hand.

I arise with the sun.
An opening into a simplicity
Already here, yet
Just becoming visible.

I am a window to actuality.
Take my words, and
Look through me, if you will
At this world’s morning.

© 2008 Alice Gardner