by Alan Harris
2003-2007
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Eternity isn't something we wait for--it's what we breathe. |
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Free PDF download of this entire book: A Matter of Breath in Adobe Acrobat PDF format (22 formatted pages including color photos) Free Adobe Acrobat Reader is required. |
Contents
(Click on any divider between poems to return here.)
Sanctuary Cove
Tucson, Arizona
Reading by Alan Harris (wma | mp3)|
Here is a chapel simple enough to welcome all creeds, all vegetation, all birds, all humans. People of vision built it up out of stone to serve souls upon this quiet foothill near Safford Peak. Visitors come for prayer or meditation or escape or inner alignment and enter into its peace. Not a myth, this place-- mortared local stone, cactus needles fully sharp, red earth of ancient lava. When outer living has led to a thirst for contemplation, a path leads you to the door. Walk in. Adjust your eyes. Choose a bench for sitting. Beliefs fade into Silence opening into Mystery as doves out on the roof are cooing a knowing that you lost long ago. |
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Information about Sanctuary Cove
Wanting
Reading by Alan Harris (wma | mp3)|
I didn't want to have to want but I had to want not to hurt so I wanted what I felt was best but everyone else wanted it too and there wasn't enough of it so conflicts and hurt prevailed even though we wanted peace. Now what I really seem to want is not to have to want at all but if I can always never want will that be what I'll always want? |
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Weather Forecast
Reading by Alan Harris (wma | mp3)|
Plan on being warmer tomorrow with a 60 percent chance of light karma mixed with opportunity. No storms are in sight until Friday when a wave of retribution sweeps in from the West to spread doubts and briefly intense doomshowers. Your historical high for this date has been forgotten and let's not even think about your low. Tune in tomorrow, way in, and remember, if you don't have any weather, you are somewhere else. |
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Now, Sweet Now
Reading by Alan Harris (wma | mp3)|
When quiet has its way, a subtle glow may grow inside the heart's heart. One's furnishings reflect a different cast of light when silence fills the room. Consonance with core allows a laying down of petty weekday will. All cells become as servants to a Master higher than the calls of sense and self. True, jostlings and lacks and irritating chores await the coming down. Dark evil, multiform, may offer up its dirt, and errors their regret, but in this now, sweet now, a subtle glow is growing inside the heart's heart. |
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Permissions
Reading by Alan Harris (wma | mp3)|
From whom does your life have its license to live? Not from Rome or Scriptures or fine-robed Interpreters-- not from parent or teacher, policeman or mayor. Your frame can be governed but your heart heeds the One as butterflies do aloft in a breeze over leaf and flower in tune with The Will. Enclosed please find within you a church never built, yet nearer than one breath away. |
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Seeking until Found
Reading by Alan Harris (wma | mp3)|
There is a footless path, a carless road, a planeless flight to a placeless mountain within. When focused on our outer joys we seek after things that weigh or thrill, we dignify the use of force, we laud coarse lucre with our hopes. Seeking without, we remain without. If we but listen quietly for the call to an inner mountain state, we find that our souls are known and loved by a subtle shepherd grooming us to serve and build, to sow and reap. Knowing our knownness, we may find our foundness. |
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Ignorance Implicit
Reading by Alan Harris (wma | mp3)|
The flowers bloom. The wind blows. The president's soldiers torture their prisoners before cameras. The flowers bloom. The wind blows. Spam infests the world's e-mailboxes. The flowers bloom. The wind blows. US lawyers advise that torturing is legal as long as you mean well. The flowers bloom. The wind blows. The Internet hosts vicious viruses created by the brilliant ignorant. The flowers bloom. The wind blows. Partisan hatred pours out of talk shows and animates political seekings. The flowers bloom. The wind blows. |
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Two Windows
Reading by Alan Harris (wma | mp3)|
Please don't be fooled by what you think you see through that window. Nothing is there. What to see is inside the seen. Out there is a parade of decay and illusion. Inside, where seeing is whole, waits a beauty you long ago knew in the rolling of your lives. Try the window within. |
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Blissful Baby
Reading by Alan Harris (wma | mp3)|
New in a pink body now plied with milk, you sleep somewhere beyond vulnerability. Where do you go? What are you seeing? Weary parents envy your guarded nirvana. |
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Plowhorse
Reading by Alan Harris (wma | mp3)|
My horse and I are brothers, and the morning sun knows why. Within my horse resides a soul, I'm pretty sure-- more wisdom than just to strain and turn brown fields to black. I'd guess this horse was human in ages before the Ice, but now for some dim reason is sentenced to the plow. Service, a horse's essence, had best be, too, my own as we pull such plows as matter into ages still to come. My horse and I are brothers and the morning sun knows why. |
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Dove Missile
Reading by Alan Harris (wma | mp3)|
This afternoon in a chapel in the desert mountains northwest of Tucson I was standing beside a large plate glass window admiring the landscape when a dove flew toward me at top speed not seeing the window as a window The silent chapel boomed and the dove fell down still resilient enough to limp and flutter over behind some vegetation When doves become missiles guided by illusion they seem little different from the murderous hawk |
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Door
Reading by Alan Harris (wma | mp3)|
At the far end of this sun-dappled, wisteria-draped courtyard I see a Romanesque wooden door, slightly open, revealing light from behind. This courtyard is a lovely place but the door invites me further. Do I dare approach this portal and open it? Walk through? Will my future change? Why am I so beckoned? I push open the door and enter. Two attendants lead me directly to an oaken podium set before a large audience of robed men and women. I am asked to give a speech. Quietly I say to everyone: "A speech I cannot give, kind friends. There was an outer door I saw ajar, and I came boldly through, but I am no one you would listen to." The same attendants help me don a robe, then lead me to a chair among the listeners. We all sit and wait. |
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Taps
Reading by Alan Harris (wma | mp3)|
New words for the familiar tune We are sad that you've gone from this world which is still racked with war, where from hate bombs make haste-- to lay waste. May we find Light within that will guide us through dark fears and pain. For this world may we care-- peace be there. We can long for good will in all minds, in all hearts, in all souls, but for now, here you lie-- Friend, good-bye. |
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Outwhere
Reading by Alan Harris (wma | mp3)|
A rocket breaking free from Earth's gravity is, by dint of direction, traveling a trajectory into outwhere. No limit is seen to what is outer, but what is inner offers with its infinity a rainbow and a promise. Let rocket people point their probing within if they would make discoveries. Far-going rockets may be today's Tower of Babel reaching out and up to an imagined material heaven while, nearer than our nuclei, heaven is hugging us. |
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Passing and Pausing
Reading by Alan Harris (wma | mp3)|
Do you think this lived-in "Now" could be any more about self? Toys and joys, thrills and kills all decorate our deadly days. "Now's" cousin "Then" was mayhem aptly captured between bookends, whereas "Will be" rides veiled on high like cirrus clouds above the moon. With the past a mess for certain and the present a certain mess, our trust must be in the future beginning no later than here. Passing, pausing through life and life, caught up in matter's unloveliness, we still need to stay and work and be, yes be--linked in good heart as we walk on the road into Light. |
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A Vision
Reading by Alan Harris (wma | mp3)|
Our new world is coming, devoid of rage, with creatures not eaten and guns melted down. Its two-party system is cordial and fair-- the Forwardists move as the Holdists delay. The trade is quite honest and arguing's rare as the selfish now give, the ambitious now serve. How can this world ever work? you may ask. Aren't giving and serving quite dull? you inquire. We will see as we go, but the strife in the old, based on you, me, and them, was a nightmare of self. What mattered the most was mostly matter, that dubious deity for eyes that see down. Our new world is coming between all the bullets and bombs--yes, coming as surely as daylight. |
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Father, How Can I Hear You?
A Song of Renewal
Recorded Musical Duet
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Father, Father, how can I hear You? Why are the clouds so gray? Why is the wind so cold? Oh, why are the trees so bare? Father, Father, how can I hear You? Father, Father, I pray unto You. I pray for Your light, but the clouds remain; I pray for Your warmth, but the cold wind blows on; I pray for new growth, but the trees are still bare; Father, Father, I pray unto You. Father, Father, now I hear Your voice. Your sun melts away my clouds, and I see Your light; Your warm breath replaces the freezing wind; The trees are beginning to bud and flower; The landscape grows green with Your love. Father, Father, now I can hear You. |
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English Teacher Unbound
Reading by Alan Harris (wma | mp3)|
Dickinson. Frost. Eliot. Wonderful vetted poets-- but sameness of names in every school. My students are alive-- they need MEANING, not biography-worship. Bless Keats and jolly Shakespeare for all they wrote-- but now let's dare to anonymize these bards around whom schools have mummified their curricula by means of committee after workgroup kowtowing to conformist after department head after principal as the decades ditto on. I'd rather pluck new writings out of most abundant everywhere, throw them all nameless into a vibrant pile, then pull them up one by three-- READ them-- BE them-- poems and stories written by unknowns who may inspire and kindle fire. I fully CARE, but I'm captive in this well-lit, firmly-administered, climate-controlled classtomb. SOULS come here, parched souls. We're to feed them stacks of cardboard facts and poetic forms to memorize-- vital to know, we con, because they'll be on the final exam. Teachers, let us wake very much up! Dare we transcend the tried and dead? Let's each write a sonnet on why we don't read sonnets--or an elegy for the deceased meanings of passion. What would Shakespeare write about our schools? "Much Ado about Atrophy"? And Robert Frost? "The Railroad Not Taken"? I am nobody to be writing like this, nor am I in your syllabus, but I can still breathe. |
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