Often the vein of poetry opens on retreat, because I slow down. It starts with sensory experience. When I am quiet, I can hear the difference between the rustle of oak leaves and the whisper of aspen and the deeper silence of the pines. Attuning to nature offers me the gift of words. Worries block words. But in meditation, there is a stepping back from worry; a stepping away from anticipation. After meditation there is clear space to hear, to see to feel, to touch and be touched. This opens the portal and poetry pours through. What I am finding these days after meditation is the great joy of daily words.

I am not on retreat. I am traveling. I am teaching. I am being a mother, a grandmother, a friend. I am too busy. And yet in the early morning hours before my world has sung itself awake with internet and phone, there is meditation. And then there is poetry.

Here are just a few of the gifts I have been given after morning meditation:

Early Morning on Cliff Walk

There’s a crack in the sky,
and if you wait and walk,
roses will reveal themselves.
You will hear each wave
find its own song,
like birds, each one, tuning
her call.
Rushing against pebble, sand, wall,.
the face or flat of rock,
and then leveling into contemplation,
as you find your bench in the risen sun
and listen.

Amy Weintraub

Early morning at Gooseberry Beach

Home. Here. Silence
but for breakers.
As I meditate,
the beach begins to bloom.
Here, a coven of girls.
There, mother nursing baby
in the cave of a beach tent.
Another single, like me, blossoms
in the sunlight,
held in the metal of her chair.
Time to roll towel and ride home,
where the solid floor supports practice.

Amy Weintraub

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Here, but not.
Mind cartwheeling into the day,
careening away from the moment
of just here,
just this,
just now.
The way back,
beyond mantra, prayer, devotion, desire,
is sensation in left hip.
Bless it, even if it needs to be replaced.
Cross the threshold to where the body lives,
enter the portal to presence.

Amy Weintraub
June 2, 2015

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There is a clock in everything,
counting the remains of the day,
measuring the body mind’s decay.
Let breath and mantra carry you
beyond every thing,
where no thing is counted,
and nothing is all that remains.

Amy Weintraub
May 30, 2015