three jewels to run with [poem]

I walk, not running

With layers of clothes swathing me

I swim, not running,

In oceans of people

Like schools of fish, 

slithering from Cambodia. 

They walk, tired from scalding Sun,

I wonder: why don’t they run?

Run, until you escape

Reams of red, white and blue

Only to reach another country

Where ‘all dreams come true’?

My father is walking slowly, 

and he sits to rest under a tree; 

Shade casting like a dark spell

While all the others flee -

“Don’t you know,

that  this is where the Buddha sat?”

Run, don’t walk

to Tibet, India, anywhere else

while I end up in England,

No sangha in my Catholic all-boys

No rules that I want to follow,

not like the dharma I know. 

But I will walk, not running, 

Clutching our jewels to my chest.