SACRED CYCLE
by
Jamie Dedes
I wrote the first version of this a year ago. I was sitting in a Buddhist center were the children had designed a large mandala in collage to celebrate the Buddha’s birthday, which is April 8. The mandala was filled with pictures and drawings of nature scenes, the Buddha, stupas, and children at play. I was totally engaged by it with its color, movement, and imagination. The children’s mandala came together for me with the Tibetan Buddhist custom of creating mandala of colored sands, which are then blown away to remind us of the impermanence of the material world. This poem is the result. Although it has elements that are consistent with the Buddhist system, I didn’t write it as a Buddhist statement, just an imaginative one.
Is there – could it be – that there’s
more than one god, one eternity,
more than one universe, and Time
at their service, really nothing more
than a simple saffron-robed monk; a
being meditating, mediating realms
of Chaos, pulling colors and lights
and energies into lively mandala,
galaxies of air, fire, earth, blood.
·
And could it be that the blood are
uneasy souls, passing drowsy days
and nights in deep sleep, believing
dark, dank demons whispering …
“The moon never dies.”
But demons do as demons do: they lie.
·
So unready and fearful, poor souls,
when one day wind and fire stormily
march in, tramping on and through
coherence with feet deft and dusty
and in Chaos whirling and roiling,
souls passing into a renewed spin
on fate, singing desperate canticles
to nothingness, to light, to love
·
Time dons its saffron robes
sits in quiet meditation
births lively mandala
another sacred cycle begins …
Photograph of temporary sand-mandala, Drongtse Monastery, Tibet, 1993 via Wikipedia and originally posted to Flickr asamazing sand mandala by Mai Le from San Francisco, CA, USA under GNU Free Documentation License.
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