"Though one were to tend the sacrificial fire for a hundred years in the forest, if another were to pay homage to a single inwardly perfected person, for just a moment, that homage is better than a hundred years of sacrifice."
Dhammapada 8.107



Moon waning crescent
cold air, clear
here
a warm room
there
under the window
an intersection
one black wheeled figure crossing

as if
an inward solitude had split open
to reveal
someone
unknown
moving away from you.

moon waning gibbous

next project

the somnambulist is missing

There are no children to take refuge in, no father or any other relative. When a man is seized by that terminator, Death, there is no taking refuge in the family.
Dhammapada  20. 288


Cold gray
a walk to the river
rather than the sea
we live in small circles of
warm,
cold, quiet.

"And this idea of living in peace alongside abnormality is perhaps what has allowed me
to accept the strange circumstance, that it was in a time of of turmoil, involving great
unhappiness, that I first became attached to nature;..."
michael mccarthy, a singular window, the moth snowstorm

vana -
a desire,
a wood,
should not keep
one
asleep
but
shake
one
awake

A cold rain
comes,
clears
grasses,
flowers,
leaves
the
mulberry bare,
wherein a golden
nest
of fur, elm
rests,
while under,
against dead
brush a dead thrush
lays flush with drying tansy,
held by living lavender
to
this
last
green
night
before
white
tomorrow's
cold -
an old story,
this,
within
which
winter wins,
every time.