Six Diamond Sutra Poems

By Peter Joryu Harris

(and one by Kaylee Bates)

1.

The Way It Always Is

One day, a beggar gets up and eats breakfast, puts on clothes, begs, comes home, washes his feet. Then he sits. When he inhales, he is the king. When he exhales, he is back to being the least among us, free of any damn thing.

2.

Magnetic Resonance

A pittance lands in the beggar’s cup. Its clink awakes the world.

Or if you prefer something magnificent, try this by a current 4^th grader in Waterville, a poem written in response to the prompt, “Write about your favorite color”:

Something is Clear

Clear is like glass: you can fill it with anything, but it’s still clear.

Clear is a tear Coming down from your eye When something happens.

Clear is how people feel
When they let everything out
And then have or feel nothing inside.

Clear shines in the sight of light.
Clear you touch when you
Think nothing is there.

Clear is the glass you look through
With a gazing-off feeling in your mind
Out the colorless window
When you reach unknowingly beside it.

Clear.

…Kaylee Bates

3.

Of The Diamond Sutra as a Commencement Address:

Instead of the rich, study the maple in May setting free the world, one winged rooter at a time.

Then try telling those seeds to stop sprouting, to flick-flick their propellers back onto the tree.

Note the gaze of the pebble as it refuses the temptation to laugh or in any way try to improve on silence.

To the pebble, dirt is not a mink coat. Dirt is not not a mink coat. Therefore, Get dirty! Sprout!

Then forget “dirt” and “sprout.” Would you climb a ladder into the light if there were no light, no ladder, no climber?

Therefore, Climb!

4.

Spiritual Vagrancy

In every town along the Kennebec, vagrants live out what we deny.

When we meet them in the street, they liberate God from the confines

of a name. Their generosity beggars us all. If they snarl

or mumble, and if we listen, we can hear the music of the spheres fill the emptiness between our ears.

5.

Manjushri’s sword only appears to cut through the names we give the air.

6.

Will Buddhism Survive?

Only if we all become that second baseman who dove to his right, snagged the liner, thudded

to a stop on his belly, too late to get up or change
hands, too late to do anything but what he could
not do, had never tried, could not have done if he had tried:
shovel the gloved ball backhanded over his back
without looking, to the shortstop. No,

not to the shortstop, but to where the shortstop
would be when he flew across the bag,
barehanded the ball, toed the bag, swiveled,
elevated above the maverick ox of truth barreling
down on him from first, high enough to make the seeing eye
throw to first for the double play. Game over.
The not-doable, done. Outside the scriptures.
Outside thought: No sound at all inside
the redundant thunder of applause.

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