Poem "If There Is A Center, No One Knows Where It Begins"

“Enlightened Koi at Swami’s”
Original Photo © Renee Podunovich, 2023

The obsidian morning.
I hurl my heart out
into this incomprehensible starscape
and there it will reside a burning fire orb,
blazing and consumed
by the intensity of its aliveness.

Things are so far apart-
light years and galaxies,
your life and mine,
yet this morning,
everything is suspended in the prehistoric dark
the thick lagoon of the cosmos,
aquatic universe, sparkling stillness,
quiet. Nothing
but the churning mind,
nothing to do but sit as witness
to the rising and falling
the clinging and letting go
the chronic bubbling up and drifting away
of awareness.

If there is a core, a nucleus, a source,
Gaugy saw that some souls reach toward it,
some are stunned, frozen in reverence,
some contemplate the inferno from within,
others move away from the white heat of essence.
This morning, some are being born,
some are dying,
some are casting a net of forgiveness over
the sea of despair.

The sea like a tear
holds what is precious,
impossibly huge, I drink it
with a straw.

- Renee Podunovich, from Chapbook If There Is A Center (Art Juice Press Editions, 2008)

Used at text in song "Obsidian Morning" by Juantio Becenti, featured at the New York Festival of Song, 2015