30 Poems in 30 Days - Twenty-three: Karma Will Cut You to Ribbons

Have Your Cake Distressed Red - SweetDee on etsy.com

I love the phrasing of this poster. The word "will" changes the emphasis from having a devil may care I'll do as I please and what are you going to do about it? attitude to the devil's gonna get ya and get ya good. SweetDee's poster makes me feel much, much better about things. Seriously. Just the thought of those particular cake--eaters getting theirs, well, my heart rate zens out.

Karma, what goes around, comes around, is the springboard for today's poem. I've posted basic information about karma from wiki. I really don't know where this poem will go. It may be about the law of returns, what you sow, you reap, or perhaps about a woman named Karma. I'll see.

Even though I always try to make meaning from every situation, I'm leaning more to the randomness of life, in case you're wondering if I'm a believer in karma. I do believe in actions equals consequences, except that there are a lot of people out there whose egregious behavior goes unpunished. What's up with that? I suppose bad behavior is in the eye of the beholder. What I know from the list of how karma is produced is that I better clean up the invective and mafiaoso-speak while I'm driving. And I need to stop with the snarkiness.

"We are the heirs of our own actions." Buddha

Karma is not fate, for humans act with free will creating their own destiny. According to the Vedas, if we sow goodness, we will reap goodness; if we sow evil, we will reap evil. Karma refers to the totality of our actions and their concomitant reactions in this and previous lives, all of which determines our future. The conquest of karma lies in intelligent action and dispassionate response.

According to Paramhans Swami Maheshwarananda, we produce Karma in four ways:

through thoughts
through words
through actions that we perform ourselves
through actions others do under our instructions - from wikipedia




Karma Will Cut You to Ribbons
Danna

go back to that sightless fish swimming
inside the cave of the body
toward the dark-haired girl
her virgin skin shimmering
in the kitchen's ambient moonlight
metal ringing in her ears
knives falling from the rocking table
like reverberating echoes pinging
through the cave's recessess
to the waxed linoleum floor

go back to the girl looking to the doorway
her shadow self standing at the threshold
a slow hiss lifting in her coiling tresses

2 comments:

  1. Great!

    When I revive The God Particle (later this year), I'm coming to you for poems, Danna. Consider yourself warned.

    e.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh. DId I say that last year? Wow. It may never happen. But this is still a great poem, Danna.

    ReplyDelete