Lantern Beneath the Lake

How violent Nature’s birth of breath,
like a moth erupting from a cathedral of forever,

lungs unfurling as stained glass wings

shattering the silence of forgetfulness.

Memory’s past began like fog on a reflection,

 soft breath pressed against glass,

a ghost of intention smudged by gathered time.

Awareness once stood like a lighthouse on the edge of thought,

its beam sweeping the dark waters of sensation,

but now a flickering bulb,

a moth of time trapped inside the lens.

Holding becomes a cracked creation of Nature,

leaking attention into one’s soil of forgetting.

Intention curls inward,

a fern folding at dusk,

while perception drifts like ash from a fire long extinguished.

Sensation is becoming a whisper in a room of echoes,

like a feather dropped in a canyon of silence,

the marrow of mountainous surroundings

becomes as the rain that dreams of drowning,

as the crow that baptizes itself in ashes,

as the ant who carries the weight

of empires in a single grain of sugar,

Man’s response stumbles like a marionette,

its strings tangled in the roots of yesterday.

Still…

Just as the last thread frays,

a ripple stirs the lakebed.

Atop the silt,

a lantern, long buried,

rises and ignites its flame,

reminding us that the light is cyclic,

seldom lost,

only waiting.

The fog lifts unexpectedly,

the not forgotten being of swirling senses, yours,

floats as the tenacious arc in rebirth,

bowing in remembrance.