nembutsu.info Journal of Shin Buddhism

Poets Corner

Gregg Heathcote

The Golden Wind

'A monk asked Yun-Men, the great ninth-century Chinese Zen master, "How is it when the tree withers and its leaves fall?" How is it when you are empty-handed and naked, when you have nothing to hold onto, when everything you might have relied upon falls away? Yun-Men said, "Whole body exposed in the golden wind." '

['The Blue Cliff Record' cited in 'Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art' (1990) by Stephen Nachmanovitch, p.146]

NOW...
With the lightening comes the wind
Comes the wind cleansing the world
Westering warmth blowing where it listeth
Space aglowing where it nowhere alights

Stillness' ground upon this slipstream stands
Bullion vapour veined in its blast
Hearth fire in the whole emblazing
Heralded castles in the air breath-taken

Life naked dyes as day borne
Before its dawning autumnal sails sun-set
Homecoming earth so emptying travails abroad
Through and through the golden wind

AND THEN...
Where to go with this flow?
Where to let slip the sky?
Drop all your Namo Amida Butsu
And where you are just fly

Alluvial ease mines the golden wind
Luffing at all this hot air
Wing-weighted words lie all about you
Take off then Namo Amida Butsu

(© Copyright Gregg Heathcote, 13 August 1997)

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