Give me four words and I'll give you a poem

pic: www.yankeegardener.com


He calls himself “Mockingbird”. It was a name that came to him during “a sort of vision quest” on which his teachers and mentors sent him. “In the old days“, he writes, “even sometimes today, a person is sent into the wilderness, with no food or water, for 4 days to access his vision of life but in this modern world, we adapt. So I sat at home, in the park, in the woods nearby, along busy sidewalks, everywhere, holding my vision close to me. One afternoon, while walking to class at the local college, I heard a bird singing, and so I stopped to listen as I was taught. After a bit, time and space began that melting away thing it does in the presence of the sacred, and I could suddenly understand, in English, what the bird was singing. It was lovely and my heart began to soar. Later, I told the story to my teachers and they agreed that it was a good sign and that the mockingbird could be my totem. Later in dreams it was confirmed and in the way we do things, I adopted the name mockingbird, whose symbolic power is to sing our true song and to help others sing their true soul song!

Well, Mockingbird (or MB as he is often called) and I have been exchanging notes with each other about a number of things for a couple of months now. He is married to a woman from India, and is working on projects to help educate young Indian girls. MB also writes poetry. Recently he offered to write me a poem based on any four words I gave him. So off the cuff I shot off these four words to him: tree, broken, infinite, dumb. Here is the poem he came back with in a short while:

“a broken tree
bearing such sweet fruit
maybe it is the infinite
playing dumb
or rather
some silent song
of blessing
whispering into the night
calling you home”

MB lives in Lafayette, LA. Check out his home page at Zaadz:
http://mockingbird57.zaadz.com/