In Poem

I am surrounded, drowning in, being buffeted by poetry.  I feel it coursing through my insides, too impishly quick to yet parse together.  Maybe it’s the solitude, having no recent conversation apart from some awkwardly sweet banter with my singular roommate, a doe-eyed German who bemoans the cold but refuses the extra blanket proffered as we huddle before the fireplace, the only source of heat desperately needed to circulate our blood before we beat a hasty retreat to our respective beds, 4 duvets deep, and almost warm enough.  I don’t know how to give words to songs unsung, to dreams tucked deep.  Maybe it’s best I get out of their way, these words that suffer and dare to give speech to unspeakable.  I have a feeling they’ll come in their own precocious time, whether or not I’m here to catch them. 

There’s something intangible here, something holy.  A holiest of spirits carving me with exquisite delicacy as I lose myself here in this God-soaked wilderness.  I am falling, head over heels, into the mystery of sun-drenched secrets whispered on the wind, into ancient truths huskily echoed among the restless mountains.  Mysteries that heave and bulge against the confines of overflowing souvenir shops and land carved into pasture.  Mysteries that seep through packs of tourists like me barreling arrogantly through this island, naively believing we'll understand this land of the long white cloud, this Aotearoa, from the end of a bungee cord.  We the progeny of so many well-intentioned generations who believed we could own land, we could tame and cultivate this good earth into something more than what it is, something better than what it’s always been.  I feel the mountains groan and sigh, the rivers moan and weep.  But still and all, here I stand.

Sometimes I wonder who among us remembers, if any of us pay proper homage to the Holy that surrounds us, the Holy that is in us.  A divinity with which we’ve been entrusted, despite our failings.  We’re deceived by our fleshiness into forgetting our Holy, the breath that breathes us, our diaphanous insides.  But I remember now.  She’s all around, this Holy.  And as she continues to sculpt her shorelines and my laugh lines, to compose her treetop symphonies and deep sea sonnets, I realize: I'm not simply surrounded by poetry.  I am the poem.