August 2, 2007

Scant hours after a farewell night, past dawn,
a breath left the house and moved among the flags,
the prayer flags, one by one, until the string,
all of them, lifted with a sweet release of breath,
the whole bright string of them flying at once
as the sun rose and the day’s hard lessons began.

And we are graduated from that most difficult school today,
released into the rituals of grief and the ceremony
of memory, enduring the heaviness of our hands in whatever gesture
we choose of love or of memory; that whirlpool of memory,
so unlike the flags flying, so unlike the exaltation of breath
that set the flags flying that now to the sea wind has gone.

And we are returned to unknowing, to the hand spun wheels of our
praying, and the small flags, the lift of them, the farewell prayers
in their flying, and to the practice, practice of peace.
          Shantih   shantih   shantih.

By Richard Moore



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