The old scholars with prayer pockets and souls brimming with an obsession
Looking back on the landscape as to the Golden Age.
The life blood of classics in the pillars of time and place
As urging closer to perfection
As only the future could fool us with.

On even a hint of reward we curve our backs over books and
Practice good health and exercise.
We make investment in the world not gathering fully that
Children leave a greater mark than the history of ideas

The pedigree of scholarship is a brooding, a loneliness, at times
The joy of illumination reflected or the brackets of understanding filled.
Built so, on the individual mind and hence frailty, forgetting,
Writing things down as the paths of childhood recalled in full emotional intensity.

The children, the people, the lovers again as starting a journey
Loading up things, dogs and food,
The broken husband still possessed of a sharp tongue.
The cell of prayer carved in the monastery cave.

Look out at dawn as the river wends,
As clouds fray bright as this idea,
This day of me and mine stands even as the past,
Cupping the future in her hands for a drink, spills most of the water.

Down our shirt fronts, on our faces, in an ecstasy of water,
As an excess of light
Or even things in good measure spooling along,
Rolling down the road.

Ratified land, inebriates, tell me of your dream.
I am your eye lids, lips touching, just see
How the tiny flower treasure, the barely speaking bird
On the wing of Winter sky, grey body black head,
The flock in and gone.
The nation with its restless feet.
The flash mob self organizing
As the principle of the colony,
The impulse of the cellularity to merge and bond,
Grow and continue to exist.

A hardy presence as the shrubs on a mountain tarn.
The weedy ones, eyeing the next lay of land,
Another’s husband or bride.
All orphans and widows looking for more.

The roll of the dice, holding our lives lightly as the risk,
Sacrifice, wager of everything seems as the canoe pushed from shore in cold rough waves,
The foolish trial against the odds and rocks and snow.
Such is new land and the territory of the mind to explore and somehow
Probe with experience, words and the golden understanding aglow.

Restless number eyeing the inner prize-
See how dreams run through and away as we wake,
See how much work it takes to read,
How long to know even one foreign language or even our own tongue
Lost in the conquest, mist and remnant of another time.

People’s lives, like a warn path or a smooth handle break off the protrusions that don’t fit.
Language is a short cut always under repair.
New proposed, use disposed.
And how now find the probe of the revelatory idea,
not a psychology of self and function but the actual bliss of our beginning and end?

Greedy predators eyeing the birds as to possess their subtle nutrient and star.
We may consume them by the ton and become some other but
Does the heart fly, the shoulders sprout feathers,
The eye catch stillness as ever in the part we play, the hunger.

The pang and desire make mountains of distraction,
Traction for contraptions that mock our sensibility and
Diminish or divert the lust we need to
Wake up and live.

By Rolf Stavig, Bob Marley, “Wake up and Live”
11/28/2020