I Blog Poetry and Prose

In The Small Moments and Fault Lines

‘Idal (Justice), 8 Masa’il (Questions) 175 B.E. - Wednesday, December 19, 2018

Yesterday, December 18, I went to my podiatrist's office. After the appointment was over, I had to wait for the paratransit bus to pick me up and bring me back home. While I was waiting I wrote "Transformation"  in response to a prompt posted on "~ The Poet's Place Cafe~" . When I returned home, I copied the poem into "Snow Scribbles"  and posted it under the discussion on perspective on "~ The Poet's Place Cafe~" . The poem was about how transformation changes a person's world views.

I begin going through some hard copies of older poems that I am posting in "Devotional Poetry"  and "Poem Experiments" . I discovered two poem I wrote in November of 2002, in response to a prompt from a Yahoo poetry group. Those two poems, "In The Small Moments" and "Fault Lines", covered the topics of transformation and changing world view.

In The Small Moments

It is in the small moments,
in the silent moment,
in the tranquil episodes
         between the hours of chaos
that transformation occurs.

Metamorphoses happens
         in the silence of the chrysalis,
after close encounters of the mortal kind,
after the altered reality of terror,
after the sudden shock of realization,
of discovering the difference
         between the way I am
                   and the way I want to be.

The soul speaks in silent moments,
in the small intervals
         occurring between chaos
                   and the void;
after diurnal existence pushes
the envelop to bursting.

It is in the small moments,
in the silence of meditation,
when mind asks and soul answers
         that free will chooses.

It is in the silent moments,
in the nanoseconds
         between sleeping and waking,
in the seconds between thought and action
         that we evolve.

It is in the silent moments,
that we learn the difference between
         life and death,
between spiritual and material,
between paradise and purgatory.

I wrote both these poems in November of 2002. "Write of something done in a small moment," inspired "In The Small Moments". "Write about a fault line," inspired the poem "Fault Lines".

Fault Lines

Across nine hundred thousand miles
of unexplored territory
fault lines converge
on a single point in the known universe.

Quakes,
scattered at first,
increase in intensity and proximity,
as they flow across
the landscape.

My world view collapses
into a pile of rubble,
the past is consumed
in a conflagration of terror.

Continental plates pull apart
leaving behind a rift valley separating
yesterday and tomorrow.

I prowl
the bottom of deep gorges
looking for a path
out of my rut.

Continental plates push together
forming mountain ranges
between who I was
and who I will be.