Birthday Greeting

By Roy Dean Doughty
Written 8/15/07 Ananda Loka 3, India
For Amma

It is not as if we can ever cease being born,
Each moment of each day, all that is
Suffers the enormous travail of emerging
Impossibly from the cramped immensity
Of the void. We see a leaf, a fly,
A gecko traversing the smooth glass of a wall,
The vast and the small, the mite and the thick green river,
The great red mountain, the gnat, the sea, the moth.
The whispering and the loud, all squall, constricted
In those terrible throes, as in each moment,
Of each day, the scavenger, Nothingness, watches us,
Hungrily. This is our peace, that without flowers
Or ceremony or celebration, silence keeps chanting:
“That which is is no more.” Mother, all life,
All death, the lean dog with withered dugs,
The serpent with too many eggs to tend,
The sun with all the planets in his charge,
You are the only mover moved by care.
Care for us in this instant of our birth,
And save us for a brevity of joy
From the endless pick of the axe,
The tick of the clock.

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