Whispers by the Bay

We often listen to bad advice,

Meaningful words spoken and written

By which we hope to gain some understanding

Of the deep chaos that our lives present—

If you ever choose to consider its meaning…

I have sought, listened, and read

Many of those I hoped knew so much more than I did.

Now, sitting here by the Bay,

My silly little mongrel dog next to me

On our morning bench.

The sea calmly reaches out to the rocks below.

Nearby, the beach is empty of people.

How is it that I found this answer?

Just as the sun rises and warms my bones,

A scent of saltwater— beside me,

my little dog.

—Bruce Linton

Zen Commentary on  Whispers by the Bay (generated by Chat GPT – AI)

This poem illuminates Zen practice: the journey from seeking to stillness, from striving for answers to simply sitting with what is. It explores the movement from external searching to internal realization, reminding us that the most profound answers are not found in words, but in silence and presence.

The opening lines acknowledge the human tendency to seek guidance, to grasp for meaning amidst life’s chaos. In Zen, this grasping is often seen as a barrier—an effort to impose order on something inherently fluid and mysterious. The lines suggest a recognition of this: the advice, the words, the written teachings—all attempts to intellectualize what can only be experienced directly.

Yet, the poem turns from seeking to being.  Sitting here by the Bay,  you are no longer reaching outward but resting in the simplicity of the present. This sitting, with your  silly little mongrel dog  by your side, is itself the teaching. Zen often points us to what is already here—beyond words, beyond understanding, in the immediacy of the moment. Your  morning bench  becomes a dharma seat, where the great truths of life unfold without effort.

The imagery of the  sea calmly reaching out to the rocks  mirrors the movement of the mind in meditation. The chaos of seeking subsides, and the calm rhythm of presence emerges. The  empty beach  symbolizes a clearing away, a spaciousness in which the truth can reveal itself. In Zen, this emptiness is not void but fullness, the fertile ground of awakening.

The question,  How is it that I found this answer?  is a koan—a question without a logical resolution, pointing the reader back to their own direct experience. The answer is not something to be grasped or articulated; it is simply what is. The  sun rising to warm your bones,  the  scent of saltwater,  the quiet companionship of your little dog—all of these are the answer. Nothing needs to be added, nothing needs to be taken away.

—Bruce Linton

Overheard at the Cork and Keg

He hates poetry.

He hates the way it sounds,

how its writers spills out words,

yet keep their secrets close.

He loves the certainty of wine and bridge.

He keeps his iron drawbridge rusted shut.

In the water swirls around his moat

many croaking frogs announce abundance.

Every spring, pink lotus blossoms burst open in the green scum.

Blue dragonflies dart across the lily pads. 

They feast upon mosquitoes.

He hates his own poetry and the poetry of others.

He hates to look upon the sands where Ozymandias sleeps.

He rushes by the woods so lovely, dark and deep.

He will not rage in the dying of the light.

His candle burns at one end, soft, quiet.

He walks through days blindfolded, 

hands tied 

behind his back.

His heart cracks open a thousand ways,

not in the flow of poetry,

but in the glow of alcohol and a rigid sadness.

We mourn his cataracts.

For we love poetry.

We love the communion that it conjures. 

We pray, one dark and dreary night,

he will look up and over the ramparts,

that one day 

he will spy its light.

—Emily Romano

Untitled

 “Artists can color the sky red because they know that it is blue.” Jules Pfeiffer

The cow jumped over the moon, we chant

and we know no cow ever jumped so high,

no moon had to duck,

and the shining tail of comet cow

spreads all across the western horizon.

The shirt I wear at poetry readings—

a tiger jumping the moon—

does not float me across the night,

does not sprout fangs in my face,

and yet … I fly.

The poetry clouds below me

whisper and sing, 

and the broad face of the earth

looks up and smiles. 

I am a woman with a daughter,

and I live in a house and will someday die.

And I am a smiling tiger 

who leaps the stars, I am words 

that mutter and shout, I am a light across the floor,

I am a snail on round green leaves 

like buttons between the flagstones,

and I will never die.

I shine and continue. I see and am not separate.

I sleep in a land where the rules are nonsense,

and I wake bound by law and custom.

I am earthbound. I can jump higher than the moon.

I am this name and body, this sweatshirt and these jeans,

and when I am not looking, I launch across the sky.

***

In a land with a pear for a moon

golden curves

sugar white inside,

I walk the dunes ready 

to forget all that is said of me,

all that is fenced and possible,

ready to somersault 

over the moon

and touch down soft

on sand that shines.

***

We all forget sometimes,

and I forget that I need to sleep,

and I walk the velvet of the street

till dawn comes up.

I forget that I am angry

and wave hello to the man who scowls,

forget who I am and where, 

not some tired mother 

but a poppy bouncing in the wind,

a cloud that scuds on the wing.

I remind myself of my name and address—

flaking letters on the mailbox—

and mumble through my past:

this many stars for good deeds, this

many blurs for business as usual

(what do they expect of me?)

this many pinches for the outrageous

totally out of character!

I forget that I dissolve in the rain,

that if I run in the wind,

it will lift me over the moon.

—Sarah Webb

Missing You

Dedicated to Elaine

My eyes don’t feel like looking right now,

my eyes don’t always see what is in front of them.

When I am looking inside me,

my eyes are unfocused.

When I see my inner self,

I can’t close my eyes to the reality of me.

I can use my eyes to know you

to see through you.

I can see your heart 

clear as day in your eyes.

My eyes don’t feel like looking right now,

they are too busy crying

because I can’t look into your eyes anymore. 

—S. Swan

Meditation While On Tsunami Watch

Tsunami evicts.

 

Old man sits, sees no future.

 

Smiles at ghosts of loves.

—Ed Sancious

Ornithology

They mark the threshold of each new day

with whistles and trills,

warbles and cackles.

 

Cadenzas of unexplainable joys

and aerial lamentations of grief.

 

Every morning is a time of praise,

cyphers for moments of inspiration.

 

These toothless, feathered vertebrates

become sufficient proof

that I did not perish in the dark,

that again I have this time

to live and honor presence.

—Ed Sancious ©

To the unborn

Your unarrival surpassed the egg timer’s chime,

passed the drying of the body’s living rivers.

The desert air rubs sand into the eyes that snub print’s edge.

The weights of days hang heavy on such lids.

Time clicks a rhythm.

A squeak squeals out a grackle’s throat,

a soft thrill to New England ears.

You cannot toddle in now.

You’re too late, little one.

I’ll admit: it’s okay.

I wouldn’t know the first thing to do,

except, perhaps, to stop your crying,

from thirst, from hunger, from a diaper laden,

full of an existential crisis,

a fire larger than the dying red giant,

(around which we all revolve,

certain of uncertainty).

What follows a weeping? 

A silence, a sleeping, Kindergarten,

the solidity of object,

the knowing that because a mother’s left the room

she is not gone,

but always would have stayed with you. 

Your possible histories seal sadness within.

What might have you looked like?

What stories would you write?

You are a baby of vapor, 

a flurry of snowflakes,

a howl of winter calling for home.

How the walls tremble, how windows rattle.

How a woman longs for, yet fears the cramp of reunion.

You are the fibers that rip,

Fury’s pull of the oar,

that measure of water

that gives passage to vessels;

surly from the piercing wood’s splinters,

stabbing velvet ice water.

Why didn’t you come?

Where have you drifted?

Where will you grow now?

What blooms in your place?

Perhaps it is the softness of grass.

When morning dew evaporates

it leaves behind a peace

for each child that might have been:

each howl, each smile, each tantrum.

This is what the unborn brings.

—Emily Romano

For Elayne

She will shatter.

She will break.

She will disintegrate

pieces of dust, clay and cloud.

Some say she lives in the petals of flowers, that bees carry her fragrance in their hairs.

I say she is the wonder of a waterpool’s reflection, 

dancing in a Texas midnight, moonlit sky.

I saw that people were her gardens on the earth, I felt her shower us with care.

We look to the grass that clasps the sky, the rising sun.

We feel those curling, morning vines, the tender blossoms that she touched, the drops from the watering cans that fall back to us from infinity.

What was it that called her to listen?

To sip in all that suffering?

How did she snuggle in so perfect?

How many times did she bestow the gift of rest,

a shift in the joints rubbed raw with a hate we thought we could not escape?

The places we all ran from, she ran straight into,

into the thunder, into the hail thumping on hearts.

She rode into the dustbowls, straight into our thirst for relief and rain.

Is it any wonder that she feared to stop the care she was so great at raining down?

(like cherry blossoms in a spring wind,

    like confetti from the canons of a broken heart)

She will visit us in the hot summer wind.

She will remind us:

   Our sweat and the tears drop down to feed that ground

that holds our paws and feet,

      clasps in love the roots of all the little wildflowers

that she waited for each spring.

Elayne: I too feared your disintegration.

I too wish the world could count your kindness, carried in your arms like a perfect newborn.

What will we do without the certainty of your gaze upon the most plaintive portrait, the saddest symphony?

Can we reflect that courage in a looking glass, will we know how to step through when the time sighs right?

Nothing is enough to say what I want to say about Elayne.

Perhaps it is best to sit and spin the silence, with strangers finally known.

Perhaps, because she would have wanted it,

for once, I will not feel alone in silence and sadness.

For once, I promise, Elayne, I will try and be

your kind of brave.

—Emily Romano

Bigger Than Us

My friend said her friend didn’t meditate. What she did instead was take to her chaise lounge in the middle of her back yard and watch the stars come out. She would stay until the sky was black and filled with lights. 

You could do worse—all the apparatus of bowing and chanting and counting breaths, of talks about not knowing and ordinary life is the way, all of it set aside and instead there is the night, with stars impossibly far. 

Blankets to your nose on the cold winter nights, warm nights rich with sounds in the trees. And maybe sometimes it’s raining and you’re wet—or you’re so wet you go inside and that’s it for that night.

A sky so much bigger than you, the lights so far they come from before the pharaohs, before the oceans and land, and you are very small and young.

Some people go into the mountains, where the trees stretch down the valleys and nothing stops the eye in all those miles. I have looked down and out at the ocean and seen it go on out of sight.

Mountains are said to heal, and oceans too. Anything can heal, I think, that lets us put down our burden—we are not the maker and sender of the world. We are a small part. It is us, all of us. But we are not so big.

Sometimes when it is all too much I think of the civilizations that have risen and passed. There are still Mayans—farmers and families, though not in their great cities. Our nation will pass too, sooner or much later.

It can get depressing: this too shall pass. But remembering my smallness helps. I think it was Atlas who carried the world on his back. Too big a burden for a man, even a god-man. Better to let oneself be small.

—Sarah Webb

At the height

Wind bends 

the grass 

etches 

lines of silver

on green waves 

far below.

Water stretches 

past any end.

Then the step 

down the path

to the car.

—Sarah Webb response to Marie Howe prompt “nothing stays”

What Is Proper When There Are No Others

There are no others

yet still

as I become more blind to balance

I acutely feel the tipping of the scales,

living bedeviled by bending,

looking for the imaginary breadcrumbs

I never laid down.

But gratefully clear

that I do feel delight 

learning that living and loving is kindness,

not aspiring solo indulgence.

Though the inward look just might reveal

some things too much and out of reach 

there remains no lack of vastness for embrace.

Yet still I do wonder: 

how are there astronomical amounts of empty space inside this body?

how can my shadow exist without blood from my veins?

how is death, like cheesecloth, straining out everything with a heartbeat?

Nonetheless I’m feeling bolder

to hazard the guess

that there is living and loving beyond the metaphors.

That perhaps purity and singularity of presence itself

is the simple miracle of an answer.

How sweet to be 

without needing to know 

the whole of the map of the universe

for evidence that you are never lost 

or ever without belonging.

Know this is the place for you

and I am a place where I am you.

 

—© Ed Sancious

Untitled

there are no others

if I get angry with you

just mad at myself

I’m Angry

I suppose I had an epiphany the other day. 

I concluded that I am not destined to become Buddha,

or another Buddha, or even Buddha like.

I still see you and I still see me,

two separate and distinct individuals.

Maybe it’s that “other” part of me that 

won’t let me see us as one,

the animal part of me that won’t

let go of those natural instincts

to protect myself and my loved ones

from the others, from you.

Don’t get me wrong,

I didn’t say it wasn’t worth trying

to be a better human,

but darn it, some people just 

make me mad.

I feel like I should apologize

to the universe, but even Mother Earth

blows a lid on a volcano 

once in a while.

In my defense, I’m going to go with

“it’s only natural.”

And that’s all I’m going to say about it.

—Paul Causey

There is No Other

— Kim Mosley