Remember Love

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Do you remember
The ten thousand thoughts
You had in a day
Between the hours of waking,
And the laying down
Of your tired self to sleep

Or do you remember
The time you stood on sand
As the ocean waves
Lapped to shore
And tickled your ankles,
And all was right with the world?

In your memory,
The not quite blue
And not quite green of dawn,
The blazing red sun turned to dusk,
The first star of the night
(star light, star bright)

A touch so deep
That skin becomes the map
Of the universe,
And there is no end
To the impulse to immerse yourself
Every contour and curve

A moment shared
Where, without words,
The longings of lifetimes
Come pounding to the surface,
Where they are held
With ancient and visceral love.

We fear that fear
Is all we have and remember.
But, really remember
The love and awe that slipped though
The cracks of thought, to find you:
This is who you really are.

– Tammy Stone Takahashi

There is No Time

We move through time

The hours and minutes

A life force from below

mounting through our feet

like a slow-burning fire,

The days our discoveries

of Sun, Moon, Starlight;

The weeks the stories

Streaking through the sky

Giving us our memories,

Creating a past of ghosts;

The years our wisdom

Won from movements

Enshrined in our remains,

Sloping down hair of grey,

Embedded in our lined faces;

And there is no place

For everything we know,

And when the fire

Is reduced to embers

And finally to ash,

There is no time that stops,

Just life to be discovered

By those who come next,

And they will find

All of our gathered secrets

In the butterflies

Hovering over spring flowers,

In the fireflies

Making dances in the night,

In the birds

Connecting all the mountains

They will never climb

And that would otherwise

Never find their flight.

 

– Tammy Takahashi

A Poem for Notre Dame

In every great plumed tree

lies the coming, naked winter,

each beam of starlight

tells of a past no more.

The stately art of an era

bears out our name, rounds out

the body of our experience,

the effigies stand time still

while leaving us desperate

to climb into the world

where memories come to life.

When a great building dies

it pours madly into the world,

scattered in all the directions,

remnants of a collective dream,

of a the sacred space where

the history of emotion lived,

with all the hushed whispers

and reverential quietude,

the rapture of encountering,

face-to-face, the ripened fruit

of our grandest human hopes

and greatest earned potential.

Every single thing that exists

contains the code of its demise

and we do not know know when,

or how, or by what means

this destruction born of creation

comes to journey’s end,

only that we can bear witness

to all this life in its passing.

 

– Tammy Takahashi

Fear in a Moon Cycle – Day 6

Here is another fear, the sixth. I would love to share this space with you, so you are welcome here!

 

 

 

Remembering and Forgetting

The art of remembering, and forgetting … like all binaries, it has to be all about balance. We don’t want to remember so much that our entire world becomes a recreation of a past that doesn’t exist anymore, so that we become incapable of living in the present moment. But we don’t want to forget so much that we lose the context for our being, the heart and bones of our ancestry that fills our vessel with so much of what makes us who we are. We don’t want to cling to what has caused us pain and give this too much potency, nor to an overwhelming nostalgia for a time we will never have back and that never quite existed. But we don’t have or want to condemn ourselves to being completely unmoored, either. We can allow ourselves to be rooted in the nurturing ground that gave rise to us without being indebted to every detail of our history. We can work toward finding freedom within the form or shell that is the life we came in to. We can work toward honouring the past and finding it it the many valuable and necessary lessons for a more hopeful future while working our hearts out to cultivate, forge, pioneer, and create the unimaginable gift of an open life for ourselves.

Here in You: A Poem

It is always a

coming home,

a remembering,

the air whip thin

and sparkling

a sundance of

unfiltered joy

the crackling

under the feet

of a whole

cycle of life

preparing for

its journey

down, out,

through,

standing still

no matter

where you are

to find yourself

at the epicenter

of the language

of birdsong,

and you don’t

want to

decipher it

because

you realize

you already

understand.

You know you

are here

in you.

 

– TS

The Beauty of Loss

A memory is not
a hole
or an empty space
creating fissures
in the wind,
anymore than a flower
is its missing petals
that discovered
their time to say
goodbye.
Why is it we look
and regard the world
from a place of
such wholeness,
only to complicate
what is absent,
or no more?
It is the full vitality
of what is
that allows even
for our experience
of loss.
We are always
what is. – TS

What heals

i want to follow

you to the place

 

past what is broken

fallen in pieces

 

to where we can

soothe our memories

 

hold them in

nature’s arms

 

find our rest in

what lives so brightly

 

what heals we the

world with her bounty. – TS

New Poem Published!

Hello!

Thank you so much for being here and for reading my poems (and viewing my photos) – it means so much to me!

It snowed last night here in Japan. Where I live, we hardly get any snow, maybe a few flurries that don’t stick to the ground. Today, a playground of white! A walk in the fluffiness last night opened my heart wide open. I’m Canadian – I grew up digging ice rink in the backyard between two ancient crab apple trees. I love snow!

An even better day to wake up and receive news that I’ve had a poem published in First Literary Review  -East. It’s not about snow, but it is about home, memory and time.

I hope you enjoy it! You can find it among really great poems second-to-last here.

Have a great day/night!

 

Path to Light

Notice how the eye

reaches first for the light,

how the heart sings

into the great distances

beyond, into the joy

that brightens our horizons.

Then, after resting

in ecstatic wonder,

now in repose,

the shadows come to view,

slowly, not before we

are ready, and we

do not succumb

to the darkness.

No, now we notice

how the shadows frame

our view, how they

pose no obstacle,

how they sift through

our consciousness,

soft tendrils of our

pained memories,

and how they give us

our path to light. – TS