Poem

You must turn away from the speech center
until the desire for language slips beyond
the weary orbits of vocabulary and definition
into that place where wordless desires and urges
become the parents of deeds. In that moment,

a sacred place will seem to open and envelop
you like a room, but you will know it has been
there all the time. You will know without words
that you are suddenly doing more than just passing
through and that you have not so much entered

anything as regained an awareness of a place more
comfortable than your favorite pair of old shoes.
If you doubt this, try to remember that a kind of
chatting goes on all the time between trees, rocks,
clouds and the great I Am. The oceans know

when the moon pulls at them and the fishes too.
There is an understanding that goes on between
everything that is and what’s happening around them.
Call it discussion if you like. I think of it as prayer—
that stuff that looks for the slightest chance or hope

for knowing it is alive. It’s what we want whether
we make poems or just burrow beneath the sand.
The moss growing on the north side of trees knows
this. It doesn’t take words to lean into the wind
and know that something living has come your way.

Fredrick Zydek lives in Omaha, Neb.