By Kim Hansen
You will not have time
To fully experience the yellow hummingbird
If you aren’t ready within yourself when you come upon it.
Save the context for later.
To fully experience the yellow hummingbird
You must bring all of your senses into potential now.
Save the context for later
When you have time to make stories.
You must bring all of your senses into potential now
So its essence can pierce you.
When you have time to make stories
You can ease the ache of raw awareness.
So its essence can pierce you,
You align your center on its axis.
You can ease the ache of raw awareness
With dreaming and writing.
You align your center on its axis,
Dance yourself around the field.
With dreaming and writing
You make an elaborate map.
Dance yourself around the field
If you aren’t ready within yourself when you come upon it.
If you make an elaborate map
You will not have time.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Kim Hansen’s life work has been somatic education through dance, massage therapy, athletics, and the Feldenkrais Method. Her revolutionary acts of the 21st century include using a clothesline, growing food, making art, and lying on the floor to explore her relationship to gravity. You can contact her at kim@KimHansen.org.
4 thoughts on “Early Morning Pantoum”
I *love* that! How amazingly evocative. It reminds me of the far more prosaic saying I ran across in a book on prayer beads: “If you sew your parachute before you need it, it will be there when you do.”
I especially love the last two lines of this poem, and what I see as the juxtaposition of the advice to be prepared and yet not to spend all my time in preparation. I do love pantoums, especially this one.
That is so cool! Love: “ease the ache of raw awareness” and many other lines!!
Laura, thank you for introducing me to the pantoum form. One of the ways it seems to work its magic is that it reveals consonant dissonances and deep perceptual shifts. I feel like it serves that purpose in this poem in a true way, or at least, in a way that I have felt in myself: doing the work of preparation and yet just making a leap in awareness and all that lies in between.