Hello everyone, my name is Jeff Brooks. I am new to your list. I have been
a contemplative in a Buddhist and Yoga context for 30 years. During that
period, poetry has been one of my main modes of expression.

In an effort to both give myself a venue of expression, as well as to provide
one for the benefit of all who wish to participate, I recently started a
Yahoo group that is dedicated to contemporary ecstatic and contemplative poetry.

This group is called the Hollow_Reed, and here is the necessary contact info:

Group name: Hollow_Reed
Group home page: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Hollow_Reed
Group email address: Hollow_Reed@yahoogroups.com
To subscribe: Hollow_Reed-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

I have appended to this post a poem as my introduction piece for that list.

Best regards to all,

Jeff Brooks, moderator
Hollow_Reed


Everything in Nothingness

When you have become everything
what is that fragment
of a moment we call
a lifetime?

The dust of my bones
blanket the planet
from tens of thousands
of lifetimes,
and you say I am not
one of your people
because this body
carries the blood
of the conqueror.

How do you know
that on some good day
to die, your cavalry
bullet did not pierce
my war-shirt, and
my blood did not soak
into the red, red earth

When you are all of space
what is that speck of dust
called a human body?
What is that cluster
of particles we call
clan, race, gender, species,
self
Buddha... God?

I have felt the fullness
of man inside of me
and given birth, and death.

My skin has blistered
in the fire of the stake,
and I have laid in heaps
of bodies in large pits
under fresh snow.

The greed of humans
knows no end,
but when the layers
of my grasping self
fell away, then
I became everything
and nothing.

-- Jeff Brooks --
© 2003