The shores of my heart
Beat with the waves of your love.
I am a desert man traveling to the water’s edge
I stand with the cool infinite rhythms of you
Needing and loving me.
I awake from illusions
Of long dry unworthiness
To know the quickened passion
In the wonder and beauty of you.
Now, vast waters of life upwell within me.
Adventure!  You! The swirling powers of you,
Are a hypnotic gyroscope of energies:
Gentle . . . fierce, East . . .West, shy . . . seducing,
Connecting in need, independent of all need,
You are a dazzling complexity, transparent.
In the night we spoke of ancestors
Living and dying by war and rape,
Of nations barbarizing nations, both far and near,
And I saw in you the thirst to know,
Of roots uprooted, and your many mothers.
Within us are so many generations.
In our flesh they announce lives
Lived in fragile hopes and hard miseries.
Yet in this intersection of our time and place
In a matrix of a thousand choices, we join.