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A Resident Scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center, Rosie Rosenzweig has recently published book of poems called Bring Me into Flesh. Her travel memoir, A Jewish Mother in Shangri-la (Shambhala), describes receiving transmissions from leading Buddhist monks and teachers. Her play, Myths & Ms, illustrates the themes of abortion and reincarnation. Her current book, newly published is called EMERGENCE: The Role of Mindfulness in Creativity. http://www.brandeis.edu/centers/wsrc/scholars/profiles/Rosenzweig.html

Becoming:
Writing Poetry at a Buddhist Retreat

I

This is all I have,

these fingers, this torso, these legs,

which took so long to inhabit,

and become all I have become now.

Then, after I understood words,-

naming things, things doing things

to things, – I found poetry,

which became all that I inhabited

to make experience real.

Ensnared with detail,

this was all I thought I wanted, –

until I found silence.

 

II

I knew nothing

before I was born,

not-sleeping,

not-self,

not-yet-becoming;

I knew nothing

before I was born,

only heartbeats,

only swimming,

in my mother’s changing pond.

Sometimes I tapped at the walls

and waited, watching her waiting,

her dreaming, her hopeful hopes

of what I could become.

I was not yet boxed and packaged,

not armored yet to see the hardships

hidden in the daily sunrise;

then, when I knew

I had been nothing,

I birthed into the noise of time.

 

III

Teach me how to die, my poet friend,

now ailing with a terminal life.

I want to know when

this body’s end date

will expire.

 

Once, almost dead, I left this world behind.

Relieved to find a solace in the clouds,

cumulous and light I was,

until the Voice sent me back

down

to do the work

I still work to know.

 

IV

Will I,

when this self dissolves,

learn

what my true life meant?

 

V

The screen has hatched

a pattern on the moon,

luminous  with paint-by-numbers boxes.

After the writing assignment,

I crane my neck to know it better.

 

VI

Others have hatched full frontal

to the balcony –

the better to incubate a poem.

Lethargy moves me to sit still,

where I hope to mind the globe

growing in my chest.

 

VII

Listening to this scratch of pens,

the only sound in the Dharma hall,

I ask the wind, riding at an angle,

to help dissolve that

ambitious yearning

to be heard.

 

— Rosie Rosenzweig

 

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