How ruled are we with talk of freedom and morning,
Illness and struggle.
Who coined these words as if the printed ballot of our collective
Could build a leader and not select one.

The tender heart of an individual may be all we have,
The sense to follow our instinct from line to line,
Moment to moment
Coming good enough for us to feel good
And to lead a thousand circuses by imagining what is left out.
Who is in the cold on such a day.
Who is born to this gift on my father’s birthday?

Immense is the nation.
Far are the stars.
We are not small for see how we can imagine such things and
Lean into our changes.

The personal and inner deepening of each other.
The call is made out beyond the pale.
Can we discover a true other person by
Navel gazing at the Universe?
The trust that you may be like me,
A quantum of infinities in flux so that
Even to brush against such holy and internal,
If not eternal numbers, in ourselves and each other is
To love your sleeve and thin arm in its cover.

I see you like a gullet of mirrors,
A dark hall, full length, the fun house reflection of our ways.

Sanity, safety scaffold of the ruined plain.
How a stage, a rostrum, a platform for the girl child,
The initiated ventured on our collective deeds, as on a history,
Four fold as it is two, as origami papers folded,
The speech pulled from the pockets of war.
Four score and history tells the battlefield and the names that fell
In the way our cards fold and blow,
Gracious for the opportunity to surrender.

Revealed in the dimension of time,
Where the square of riots is now the graceful harmony of the domes.
Old dark churches of state,
Young bold truth sayers to ease and upset us,
Inspire the smallest of all of us to feel I am and have a right to be.
The powerful laid low and the obscure finally featured.

Train of ghosts, bunting on the grand dais, ribbons in the child’s hair,
Collar on the dog, warming world talking, rubbing our hands in unison.
Strange gifts we give one another from the tree.
See how the paper and words hang around,
Lend a ballast even when soggy and never heard.
Pull out your old trunk sister,
Paddle the boat to the middle of the lake.
Lie flat in your keel, in your water of the bottom land,
Eyes on the sky to feel said craft rock as waves
To the chasm of self and world,
Pulling work from time so even now,
When possible to relax,
The wandering mind finds an instinct of conception,
A brew of soul’s insurrection
On the related and intimate canvas of the enfolded infidel.
History of the selves on the land of sky
With a world peopled, broken fully open
Imagining all loss gained and all gains lost.
A gambler’s ship of the future.
What choice have we but to
Roll it all as it all rolls away.

Writing with Cancer group
By Rolf Stavig, 1-20-2021
Inauguration Day and Mark Stavig’s birthday