Reflection and revelation

I.

I gaze upon you on the sand

a whisper of fresh breath of the morn

The ocean bathes your feet

soft, blemished, product of earth

smoothing the tan lines with grains

a pliable patch of grains

into which our hard heels press

washed o'er in a splash

II.

Yet who knows who we are

resting 'neath the coconut palm

Myst'ries lay at our feet

our hands touching the surest of them

Here the milk of the husked nut refreshes

where getting drunk leaves us dry

and even the smell of fecal sweetness

is more real than perfume sprayed on thighs

We are palettes of pigments

a canvas of gods, sketched by God

a mark like lips parting

murmuring theophanies in the universe

oblivious to our power at hand

hiding behind masks of gauze

III.

Myst'ry

we  are plump myst'ry

and if we'd touch just a hand

it is this we'd touch

this painting of God

with God in ev'ry tint 

*Reflections of Sidney Poitier:

-I called David Suskind, and I told him what the situation was, and he said, "Let me have a go at this."

I said, "Fine."   But I went on to explain that I simply couldn't do this.  I knew all about the rightwing,  leftwing tug-of-war stuff.  I was perfectly capable of interpreting it on the basis of how it affected me as a black man in America.  My political awareness had matured by then.  Yes, I was definitely, by then, inclined toward the left of center. Yes, there I found more people like Phil Rose and David Suskind, people demonstrating a genuine willingness to receive me as an equal.  This was reason enough, I suppose, for the FBI to keep an eye on me, given the fear and panic of those terrible cold war days of madness.  A time in which a young, African-American male was at  odds with his times and in constant search for answers to the core conflicts in his life.  Conflicts that had little or nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the cultural forces rooted inside him and the multitude of daily surrenders demanded of him by their social surroundings.  Balance is what he was looking for, but he hadn't yet learned its name.  In time he will come to know it as a state of being.  It can only be found at a place that is widely believed not to exist.  Truth is that there is a place of space that does exist between two opposites everywhere, and somewhere therein dwells a point at  which balance can be found.