Spiritual Sunday
My mother lost her favorite cousin on Friday, a woman who somehow managed to remain upbeat for years despite a brain tumor. I’ve been reading Music of the Sky: An Anthology of Spiritual Poetry and found five short poems, all of them heartrendingly beautiful short poems, that I hope will bring comfort to those who knew and loved Cornelia Montgomery—or who are grieving for their own loved ones.
The power in all the poems lies as much in what is not said as in what is said. For instance, in a meditation by Chief Isapwo Muksika Crowfoot of the Siksika First Nation, what it means to be swallowed by a glorious sunset is left up to the reader.
A little while and I will be gone from among you.
Whither I cannot tell.
From nowhere we come, into nowhere we go.
What is life?
It is the flash of a firefly in the night;
It is the breath of a buffalo in the winter time;
It is the little shadow that runs across the grass
And loses itself in the sunset.
A poem by Japanese Buddhist poet Kabayashi Issa sounds like it may have been composed for a child, although neither child nor death is explicitly mentioned:
The pure morning dew
Has no use for this world.
Another Japanese Buddhist poem also focuses on a dewdrop, although the timeline here is different. Dogen Kigen regards with amazement someone who died at 71:
Seventy-one!
How did
a dewdrop last?
Japanese Zen Master Kozan Ichikyo boils life and death down to their essentials:
Empty-handed I entered the world
Barefoot I leave it.
My coming, my going--
Two simple happenings
That got entangled.
My favorite of the five, an old Wintu poem (from the Sierra Nevada region), imagines companionship even after death. The scene may be occurring at a deathbed but it’s not clear who is doing the consoling. The poem moves seamlessly between heaven and earth, imagining stars as flowers that the two will pick together:
It is above that you and I shall go;
Along the Milky Way you and I shall go;
Along the flower trail you and I shall go;
Picking flowers on our way you and I shall go.
