Poem – Alone Or A Part
I wrote this on what would have been my mom’s 95th birthday, but is it to her? I don’t know. Is it to mother earth? I don’t know. Is is about being so lonely at moments it is excruciatingly painful? Is it a mix of things and feelings and thoughts? That much is certain.
Happy Birthday Mom
Alone Or A Part
Alone
brief moments of time
do I merge with the ONE
at such times I lose MY SELF
I am larger than I
Which is an ALL
And for that brief moment
I lose my sense of separate
Deep loneliness and ache for that womb
That loving dependent symbiosis where
My blood is your blood
I breathe the blood you share and
It feeds me food and oxygen
Then in a violent event I am separated
The loss so great
I long all my life deep down
For that connection
For brief moments
In a friend, a love, in nature, in art, in music, in orgasm,
I feel a connection with ALL
At times the ache so all encompassing
The anguish so total that to feel it
Completely would kill me
And so I mask it under layers
For if I embraced it
And called it by name
Surely I would perish
And the one reminder
Of my still symbiotic bond
Is my breath (my belly button an ancient relic).
Like the fish to amphibian to air breather
I must breath I must continue to fill and empty
My lungs, gills that filter out the oxygen
In this sea of air we swim in
I swim in, any one of us still alive swims in
Each one of us must breathe,
If someone were to poison my air surely I would die.
It is the sea of life
I swim in the sea and must breathe the water
The water is now my air
Poison my air and you poison me
We have been poisoning ourselves
And we struggle to cure cancer and fight its ravages
An entire industry based on this struggle
Our air, our water, our food, all tainted by our own poisons
And we wonder why our cells become aberrations
That proliferate and no longer follow protocol for cell behavior,
Misbehaving.
We could reduce cancer significantly by restoring our planet
Remind me what we are too busy doing to address the problems?
Short sighted self-interests?
But surely I have digressed
From an ache so deep I can barely see more than darkness
A fleck of starlight ten thousand light years away
A universe so infinite that forever is not enough to hold it
And yet for those few moments when I feel that vast
Where I expand and lose my ME and melt into the ALL
For those moments I live
For that hug so warm I feel my breath move with yours
I feel your chest rise and fall
Your heart beat against me
I feel your tear run down my cheek
And you wipe mine with your lips
For those moments I live
I give
And breathe
And hope
And love.
(nmitchk@aol.com)