WE ARE THAT

                 AN OPEN SECRET


the limpid color of our gaze   that's why
we can't see it   the luminous silence of
our listening   that's what we can't hear

not cloud-obscured on the mountaintop
nor buried deep in the darkest crevasse
it inspires the revelation of each breath!

when we thirst it's water   clear and cold
when we hunger   it's fresh-baked bread
yet it's even dearer   simpler than these

we spend our whole life longing for this
a prize all our eager seeking can't grasp
but it shines in the searching of our eyes!

nothing tricksey here   it's an open secret
want to join the ecstatic ones who know?
empty yourself of self   become pure light


                             ***

     We search out there, in the world, for what we want and need. But who is it who does this searching? Wisdom comes from evolving self-awareness. Consciousness itself is the great conundrum, one which even the most advanced quantum physics can't solve. One day we wake up and realize--we ourselves are the Universe, waking to its own Divinity! 

                      REBIRTH

                    (for Nelson)

I'm smack-dab in the midst of it again

and it's smack-dab in the midst of me

is a mourning dove perching in a tree?

or does it call from the crux of my soul

those intrepid magnolias--they bloom

despite the frost   within me also they

thrum   so riotously awake!   as though

each spring obliterates all boundaries

which is why I get daffy over daffodils

how they flaunt their gaudy trumpets!

I take the same ridiculous risk myself

blaring the scandalous anthem  "I AM!"

then there's the grass--another prodigy!

it spears up through cold crust   reborn

out there   under an unscarred blue sky

and in here   where the sky never ends

                           ***

    I've always been a spring junkie. It's my favorite season, although seldom the easiest. Part of me struggles to return from a winter dormancy which sometimes feels almost like death. Yet when I thrill to those first irrepressible signals of nature's resurrection--say, the magnolia's blossoms, a mourning dove's call, or the gaudy trumpets of the daffodils!--then the nascent, renewed life deep within me stirs, resonates and responds. I discover that the rebirth outside me, and the rebirth inside me, have converged as One.

                                  ***

      The two poems in today's blog, as well as the poems in the preceding two blog posts, are all from my latest book COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS: Songs Of An Ecstatic Soul. It can be purchased at Amazon.com (feed "Cosmic Ecstatic Bob Savino" into the search engine). This book, as well as my two others--REPORT FROM THE FRONTIER and BLACK BUTTERFLY--also will be on sale when I read at the Lawrence Poetry Fair, held this Saturday, April 15, from 2 to 5 p.m.,  940 New Hampshire St., Lawrence KS.