There is no time to mourn
This brutal passing
This silvered flash
This sacramental transformation
Before this salmon had respite from its journey
Eagles tore it asunder
Feasting on the choicest morsels
Cleanup gulls sweep up the rest
Bringing fishfragments to new life
High above, circling
While rain drums down
River overspills lawn
Everything a lot more fluid
On this gray day
Cloudcleansed and riverscoured
Nature serves holy communion
All around
David Trudel © 2012
Filed under Poetry
I am reading some Marcus Aurelius today. He was the Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 A.D. and was one of the great Stoic philosophers. Here are few passages that particularly resonated for me:
“The perfection of moral character consists in this, in passing every day as the last, and in being neither violently excited nor torpid nor hypocritical.”
“When you are troubled about anything, you have forgotten this, that all things happen according to the universal nature, and that a man’s wrongful act is nothing to you; and further you have forgotten this, that everything that happens always happened so, and will happen so, and now happens so everywhere; forgotten this too, how close is the kinship between a man and the whole human race, for it is a community, not of a little blood or seed, but of intelligence. And you have forgotten this too, that every man’s intelligence is a god, and is an efflux of the deity; and that nothing is a man’s own, but that his child and his body and his very soul came from the deity; that everything is opinion; and lastly that every man lives the present time only, and loses only this.”
“It is in your power to live free from all compulsion and in the greatest tranquility of mind, even if all the world cry out against you as much as they choose, and even if wild beasts tear you limb from limb.”
Filed under Passing Thoughts
My optimism rises
Like a solar transverse, daily
In the face of disaster
Looming on all fronts
I see hope
Slim chances are better to grab onto than despair
And if we can’t stop the incoming tide of a rising sea
We can prepare the shoreline
For its new shape
We can disregard the fearmongers
The deniers
Those who say it’s all too much
We can choose optimism over pessimism
Daily
David Trudel © 2012
Filed under Poetry
Sometimes you exasperate me
With your half responses and ambiguities
Leaving a myriad of inferential
Possibilities
Long silences
Unanswered questions trailing away
And then you reappear
Fully
Joyously
And ultimately contagious
There is no vaccine or antidote
To your exposure
A topical disease
Of some renown
Is the usual outcome
I am not immune
David Trudel © 2012
Filed under Poetry
