IF EVERY FINGERPRINT...If every fingerprint is different from all others,
Not even like the ones on one’s own fingers,
It’s no surprise that in more basic matters
Like with whom... for what... and why
One longs with passion for another someone
Goes beyond what most of us imagine.
The fingerprint is not the best or most exact example.
The tiny grooves and whorls on fingers and on thumbs
Are not connected to the mind or heart... and not the soul,
Being territory mostly unexplored and known.
I think it’s in the mind and heart we leave our mark.
Love is the fingerprint that’s written on the heart.
. . . . . .
Who can tell when different means danger
Or great good fortune and best of luck?
Do the good and the bad come often
Bundled together in a package of oddities
With outright freaks of nature, aberrations...
With reasons to hide... at least to be on guard?
What about those people we have loved and trusted?
Is it possible the things we don’t know about them
Would frighten or at least make uneasy...maybe repulse
The neighbors... even a mother or a best friend?
Closer to home, what about me? What about You?
What makes us not the same as all the others?
. . . . . .
Differences don’t always have their happy side.
We pass unnoticed if we’re the same as others.
Sometimes it’s good to sit alone in silence.
The woman brought to court on charge of murder
Was said to weep and wail because the papers
Said she’d never go again to feed the birds.
Every saint who ever lived in any place
Was strange enough to be considered wild
At least enough to make the world uneasy...
Attracting folks with guns or hangman’s noose
Or stones and hate enough to fuel fires
and stoke the pyres of truth and righteousness.
. . . . . .
The dancer strutting boldly on the stage
Who runs and turns and leaps in almost nothing
But the tights I’d hesitate to wear at home.
By doing what he can and wants to do
And giving up all chance of normal life,
Baryshnikov is not the same as others.
We walk along the beach beside a rolling sea
And everyone around us strolls and looks
At diving birds and children daring waves
While mothers watch and wait and hope
A child can be at home out in the world
But be as different as his fingerprints.
2 comments:
That photo of what probably is Mom, looking protectively at her son as he plays at the waters edge, doesn't that tell a story? Maybe a whole book.
For whom or what do you long, dear friend? If I were to say that longing is relieved by love, then I would also have to say that you, dear friend, should have exchanged your longing for celebration long ago. Or is it distance that produces longing, the distance like the one between the mother sitting on the beach and the child playing at the water's edge, she longing to be with him? Looking directly at what is and for what or whom we long makes us aware that it is the way some of us are made, we long and will long until we stop breathing. Or is it that we've brushed the fulfillment of our longing, enjoyed every experience when our longing met mutual satisfaction, and want to bask in every day? I just know that longing takes us to places we’d otherwise never travel, has allowed us to take risks we’d never intentionally take, invited us to be as vulnerable as we could ever hope to be, helped us put our fingertips to God's and be created again and again. So, I don't think that longing is relieved by love, I think it's the only way to experience it.
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