You Must Breathe

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When there is thick, soft silt below your feet

and water

dense and long overhead,

re-member that you must breathe.

You must fill your lungs.

You must rise, at some point,

and breathe.

This being human requires

that we let something

of this world

in.

© 2012-2020/Jamie K. Reaser
From "Coming Home: Learning to Actively Love this World"
Published by Talking Waters Press

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The Rhythm

Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

We’ve all heard

our mother’s heart beat

from beneath her skin.

This is our rhythm –

an inherited sense

of right and righteous timing.

“Home” and “Not Home”

are sequences, patterns,

familiar and unfamiliar.

All your life,

memory has been

the drummer –

and you’ve marched.

Has it served you well –

This rhythm?

This onward march?

Recently, I’ve been lying

on the Earth in fetal position –

and listening.

This is when I really re-member

that sound, this feeling.

This is when I re-member the

ancient rhythms of

The Mother.

This is when I know

I no longer need to

march.

This is when I know

I’m Home –

Everywhere,

and always.

The First Mother

would have embodied

this rhythm.

Somewhere down the line

someone missed

a beat,

And we’ve all been missing

it ever since.

So profoundly missing it.

Now.

Head upon The Heart.

It’s up to us to re-member.

Head upon The Heart?

Cheek on bark or moss or stone.

Are you listening?

This is what the future

will hear.

~ Jamie K. Reaser, Author

Published in "Coming Home: Learning to Actively Love this World"

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Consumed by Death

Photo: (c) Jamie K. Reaser

Sometimes Death leaves us

there, at roadside,

without apology

or explanation.

Stillness resides in nothing

but our form,

all else whizzes past

with agendas.

The palm of my right hand

has known the pulse of the

very last heart beat

beneath feathers and fur,

and skin that I watched wrinkle

for twenty-seven years.

This is my decision:

I don’t want to be abandoned

by Death –

I want to be devoured.

I want to be taken into

Death’s wet, gnashing mouth

as a wanton carcass,

insatiable in my desire

to surrender.

I want to be consumed

in my entirety,

to be nothing to which

to attach a eulogy to.

I want to depart this world

with less than I brought

into it.

When the last morsel of me

can be described as nothing

more than the last tidbit

swallowed by Death,

then, I will know,

then, I will know,

yes, I will know,

My life had been juicy enough.

© 2012-2014/Jamie K. Reaser
From "Coming Home: Learning to Actively Love this World"
To be published by Homebound Publications in October 2015