The white dot & Burning books
by Nicholas Hogg
[ poetry - june 05 ]
The white dot
I once saw Jesus Christ
in a crop circle,
or at least a man
who looked like him,
naked in the middle of a field,
stripped to the sky
and calling for The Light.
Like on Christmas Day in 1996,
when I chopped a TV set
clean in half
with a long handled axe,
and saw the white dot
split like an atom in the sun,
the brightness blinding.
Burning books
He knows the ash will rise like a butterfly lift,
flakes in the trees and bamboo smudged.
A Samurai reads but owns no books
When the cover is closed, the last page turned,
the fire is fanned by a weight of words.
It is the end of a god or a lesson in Zen,
the brushes of kanji where a picture is sound.
Yet nothing is lost.
Though the thoughts of another have passed
in time
like a petal in a stream
or golden koi,
the memory is pressed and knowledge is left,
the gleaned out then in the act of now
where he sits
on a rock with an opened book,
nothing in the world but a depth of breath,
the wood that cracks and splits with heat.
