Rumi’s Request
“When I threw away my old eyes,
grass grew from the sockets.”
I begin to think of my ripening body as
a sack of fertilizer richer than compost or
plant food from Costco.
So, when it is time, bury me shallow,
my skull a bowl of bone with
eye sockets easily entered (into the space
once occupied by thought) by small,
damp creatures.
They will feed like kings.
Think what bone marrow will accomplish
as it leaks into the soil and nourishes
nematodes. Beetles will love me.
I’ll be humus. Instead of weeds and
crab grass, I hope to grow green grapes
and wheat. Jasmine will rise above me,
sweet with the smell of my dying.
Ceremony of silence
A whisper of leaves,
then a stillness
like bird-watching.
A reversal of the usual quality
of attention.
How to damp down
the clatter
so that all we hear is
the small creep of the beetle
up the bark
the world
listening intently to
its own breath.
Luci Shaw was born in London in 1928 and has lived in Australia and Canada. Author of over 35 books of poetry and nonfiction prose, since 1986 she has been writer-in-residence at Regent College, Vancouver. In 2013 she received the 10th annual Denise Levertov Award for Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University. Her most recent publications are The Thumbprint in the Clay (InterVarsity Press) and Sea Glass: New & Selected Poems (WordFarm), and Eye of the Beholder (Paraclete Press) is forthcoming. She lives in Bellingham, WA.