237. IN THE SOFT NOOK OF AN OLD TREE.

I Will Read for You: The Voice and Writings of Jaiya John

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Reading a selection from my book, Lyric of Silence, which begins, In the soft nook of an old tree... My new book, Fragrance After Rain, and all my books are available online at booksellers worldwide. eBooks are exclusively at my website. Thank you for posting your copies on Instagram, tagging #jaiyajohn, encouraging others to purchase, posting readings of your favorite passages, and sharing online book reviews. My whole heart cries Grateful. jaiyajohn.com.
VERSE:
In the soft nook of an old tree, on a canyon side painted in night, a luminescent beating heart calls out to a known soul on the canyon’s far side:
Would you have drawn your arrow and sent its force into my place of origin had you known a spring of wanting would burst forth into a geyser?
Known soul answers:
Yes. For I am nothing but that which goes where wanting grows. I am that swollen plum gathering my sugar and flesh, preparing to be dearly eaten. I am dying to be devoured in the collective aching heart. I am suffrage on the lip. I am called out of the chasm, to return to the chasm with bits of light and frayed notes from a song. I have come for those who bleed in the dire dust. I am a bee driven mad by the sweet pollen of joy and laughter. I am dew dropped by sky into the tearful buttercup heart of the passionate ones. I am sky pouring out over itself, earth running over its earth.
I cannot stop this weeping, which is my own weeping, left in washed out gullies, in villages of despair, to mark faces in salt, so this Love can find them. I have a kite string tied to joy’s updraft. I will not let go. When the fearsome beast roars in the apogee of our primal fear, I will kneel to stroke its broad sternum and offer my head to its daggered jaws if that be my fate. I am drawn to wanting, that phosphorescent tidal pool from which I first emerged, slick and sniffing air when dawns had yet no light.
This stretched skin I shred in every moment is the drumhead handed down by the ones who sing in darkness and hew light from charcoaled walls of cave. They who with sharp bleached bone spill their hearts at the river feeding the valley their red romance of Lovingness. They who see the mist inside the minutiae seen by solemn seers. They who cover their faces in old mud and dance in the cold current until new corn grows. They have given me this skin that taunts me in its echo and leaves from me daily aloft in tattered uprisings.
This heart within is a sounding bell. Only the deepest soulful yearning in this world can make it tremble. And when it moves, its only voice is an absolute elation destined for those fields of wanting, brushed by sky beneath sky in their unattended serendipity...

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