Status Updates From A History of Kindness

Bark, when I see you with an injury
and the amber colored sap like golden blood,
I have to wonder if nerves are inside,
if it hurts the same. I can't help
but to bandage you.

sky watchers know what stars tell others
and where the milky way takes us back
to the fold of the galaxy, a spiral trail souls follow
when they walk away from the body rib.

It is hard for some to know
the world is a living being.
They live with forgotten truth
replaced with belief. Perhaps that's why
the books of the Mayans were burned,
and written languages destroyed in the North.

(And perhaps why textbooks have been removed now from most American classrooms).

When the river changed course
and washed land away,
each bend grew sharper.

The hands have their reasons
unknown to the heart,
a needed touch,
the kindness of another skin.

The fingers have their own aims,
to make beauty, to touch softly
something to live by.

The world takes a bit at a time. It takes
what it wants by pain, injury, hunger, war.

The world takes a bit at a time. It takes
what it wants by pain, injury, hunger, war.

The whole world
was the gold you wanted.

Some of us are like trees that grow with a spiral grain
as if already prepared for the path of the spirit's journey
to the world of all souls.

A human does throw off the bonds if she can, if she tries, if it's possible.
The body is so finely a miracle of its own, created of the elements
of anything that lived on earth
where everything that was
still is.

They walk on the ghosts
of all that has gone before them