The woodlands
stand before me,
in stillness
the trees welcome me
into themselves. The
Divine Mother sings in
my ears, as branches clap
to a chant flooding the road
preparing the way for
God’s big belly laugh.
*****
The Buddha laughs,
his round belly carries
the joy of everything:
he’s given up renunciation
for an incarnation
of happiness. His fullness
holds the road
that begins anywhere,
and leads nowhere,
so all universes
everywhere
may inhale
and exhale
the Buddha’s
big belly laugh.
******
“Behold, the entire
cosmos turning
within my body,”
Krishna said to Arjuna,
showing his true form,
revealing himself as
the source of every breath,
every leaf, every organism,
every mountain peak,
every sun, every galaxy,
every circulating gesture of Vishnu
in all past, present, and future yugas.
Krishna showed Arjuna
there is nothing
He is not.
The overwhelming wonder
terrified Arjuna, so Krishna
discreetly veiled his form. But
He mischievously timed
his concealment,
a second before Arjuna
would have witnessed
the revelation of all origin:
Vishnu’s first
big belly laugh.
*****
Fish and bread offer
meager celebration
after a resurrection:
in their existential haste
the writers forgot about
that dance with Mary Magdalene.
After astonishment,
fingered wounds, and meal,
wine flowed from new skins.
Fermented on wine
and eternity, Jesus reached
for Mary’s hand,
took it in his, and said,
“Let’s dance.”
He twirled his beloved
a hundred times,
then a hundred more,
their fingers wrapped
around each other,
they laughed
until the heavens
rolled and unrolled
ten times ten
times ten, and
they tumbled
to the ground in joy;
engulfed by their laughter,
Thomas believed. Jesus bent
next to Mary’s rapt being,
her eyes incandescent with joy,
and he whispered in her ear,
“I wear your anointing still,
and I will wear it until the end
of time, when all that
remains is my Father’s
big belly laugh.”
*****
The woodlands
stand before me,
the trees invite me
into their arms, and the sky
calls me home. Beside the road
dogs howl, their clamor
recedes as
shimmering trees
envelop the road.
The Divine Mother
rises from the ground,
chanting holy sweetness
in my ears, her white robes fold
circles around me, again and
again, twirling me ten times
ten times ten. My feet rise
from robe, road, and earth,
lifted into sky and sun,
the Mother’s love
soaked fragrance and
I become one.
On the unseen road that
begins anywhere
and ends nowhere,
I surrender
to all that is,
as the Divine Mother
carries me home
to most high heaven, and its
celestial temples, where live
angels and prophets and poets
and those resurrected in
God’s big belly laugh.
Notes:
This prose poem was drafted late last summer. That month was flooded in luminous images difficult to untangle, their speed and intensity overwhelming.
The poetic arc I tried to capture was God’s laughter, a trope all but ignored except in the mystical traditions, because the ego hates joy — and religion loves to keep us in our suffering.
It’s been months since I’ve looked at this, but I felt nudged to return to it today.
The final version, which will take shape for another year or two or ten, will include a section on Hafiz, the Islāmic Sufi poet who inspired it; but that part still isn’t drafted.
Strange how that works, the poet who seeded my imagination remains invisible.
A couple of quick notes on the sources: in Buddhism, the image of the Buddha with a big belly is an iconic or metaphorical representation of unbound joy and expansiveness. Not an exercise in realism, but expressive license.
The section on Krishna refers to the Bhagavad Gita. In the “Song of God” (Bhagavad = God, Gita = song) Krishna reveals his true form to Arjuna, and it’s one of the text’s highlights. One of the world’s most important religious documents, it’s an excerpt from the Mahabarata. It’s a small but powerful text, and I strongly urge anyone with spiritual thirst to dive into its pages.
Krishna is an incarnation of Vishnu — a relationship that many liken to the Christian father-son relationship.
In defining “yuga,” I’m being lazy, and for brevity’s sake I lifted a definition via Wiki: “Yuga in Hinduism is an epoch or era within a four age cycle. A complete Yuga starts with the Satya Yuga, via Treta Yuga and Dvapara Yuga into a Kali Yuga. Our present time is a Kali Yuga, which started at 3102 BCE with the end of the Mahabharata war.”
Indian religious cosmology and mythology’s vision is vast: human history takes place in an endless cycle of Universal life and death. The universe folds and unfolds, age after age. Human history is dwarfed by the larger forces at play. Think of pictures from Hubble, and you get an idea of Indian cosmology.
It was important to me to portray a laughing Jesus. The idea of a laughing, not smiling, but an irreverently laughing, love intoxicated Jesus came powerfully to me during this month of poetic flooding. The Jesus we never see, the one who danced, sang, loved, engaged with life as a fully alive, aware being, not the mystically detached blue-eyed Caucasian that dominates our narratives.
This is the Jesus of Christ at-one-ment, not the small cult figure that’s strangled our spiritual imagination.
Lastly, hearing the Divine Mother chanting isn’t a metaphor — it was real singing. But I’ll leave it at that.