Photo courtesy of: IMG_3091 by Redwine1969 – Flickr
http://tinyurl.com/kxj3zbo
My friend, poet, and fellow TSK student, Ken McKeon sent me a poem in response to a brief exercise we did in class. We’ve actually done many variations on this practice, but in this case Ken was simply having a quiet cup of tea and happened to focus on a ceramic cup that he had never paid much attention to before. He told me…
It was “…a white cup with a sort of garden design on two sides: leaves, stems, blooms, butterflies, and a bee. Looking within the design, rhythms appeared. Such a find, stillness and movement. In a sense, the given occasion became a welcoming, an inviting external arising that called forth an internal response. The interplay of the two gave birth to the poem, this true whatever the merit of the piece. This also pretty commonplace, as is the poem’s subject. It helps me to write this out because doing so reveals one version of artistic creation.â€
His striking poem below, reminded me of my own singular moments where time and space expand, when all is seen and felt in a flash, when tunnel-vision opens exponentially, where as Ken says below while absorbed by time, open knowing, and his tea cup…
“To bloom…in rapt shift
Of unfolding ever time as quick away
And gone as a finger snap””
Late Fall Evening Poem
By Ken McKeonOpen white bulging ceramic tea cup
Been traced on with flower play, so
Balanced and still, then forms filled
With shades of green, so stems lift
And shoot out and up, and even more
Leaves and furled and unfurling
Blossoms of purple and spring
Sprung blue, and even three butterflies,
Tilt to lean inward to the new flowerings,
The lilting buoyant growths, and here
Too one bee, its senses ready, its wings
Blue, it’s belly banded yellow and fuzzy grey,
It’s full of a still silent buzzing urgency,
It’s here with blooms and butterflies.On this sullen intermittent rainy day,
Nothing is to be believed, but this cup
Holds still an arising tide to be again
As warmth on hand flesh, then the lift and tilt
Of tea to lips, mouth now awash in floral tones,
Belly happy with these doings done
In the late light foggy overcast illumined
Day of late fall easy birth the tug and pull
Of springtime on its way, morning time,
Gloom edged clouds ripening to fade aways,
To bloom and bee colored in rapt shift
Of unfolding ever time as quick away
And gone as a finger snap, bright brighter
White brightness ceramic cup seedbed
Full flowering still tune now quite done.
