Everything in Nothingness

When you have become everything
what is that fragment
of a moment we call
a lifetime?

The dust of my bones
blanket the planet
from tens of thousands
of lifetimes,
and you say I am not
one of your people
because this body
carries the blood
of the conqueror.

How do you know
that on some good day
to die, your cavalry
bullet did not pierce
my war-shirt, and
my blood did not soak
into the red, red earth

When you are all of space
what is that speck of dust
called a human body?
What is that cluster
of particles we call
clan, race, gender, species,
self
Buddha... God?

I have felt the fullness
of man inside of me
and given birth, and death.

My skin has blistered
in the fire of the stake,
and I have laid in heaps
of bodies in large pits
under fresh snow.

The greed of humans
knows no end,
but when the layers
of my grasping self
fell away, then
I became everything
and nothing.

-- Jeff Brooks --



Hollow Reed
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