Thomas Rain Crowe

Thomas Rain Crowe

Becoming Buddha

We are all thunderstorms and lightning
waiting to occur.
Children
standing on the steps of the unknown
gazing toward spring.
Seeds from the garden
becoming food.

As we grow through the rings in our bodies,
the memories dance. Like trees.
Like darkness
dissolving into light.
Knowing, somewhere there inside
that death is giving life a chance.
That freedom is singing its own song.
And birds are not the only ones that fly.

God is a verb.

And we are moving through timeless space.
Dropping weight of arms
and extra legs along the way. Moving from caves
out into sunlight like flame.
Like the confidence of wind. Like drying rain.

And we arrive on the circling shoreline of ancient sea
and sing.
Until each of us is
all of us. And all of us
are each of us:

Thunder.
Lightning.

The whole thing!

Thomas Rain Crowe is an internationally-published author of thirty books. He edited the classic Celtic language anthology Writing the Wind: A Celtic Resurgence. As an editor, he has worked with Beatitude magazine, Katuah Journal and the Asheville Poetry Review. As an environmental activist since 1979 he has worked with and/or helped to found such organizations as The Canary Coalition, AMUSE (Artists & Musicians United for a Safe Environment), The Project to Protect Native American Sacred Sites in the Southern Appalachians, the Western Carolina Alliance, The Southern Biodiversity Project (Wild South) and the Environmental Leadership Council for Western North Carolina (Warren-Wilson College). He is founder and publisher of New Native Press. His literary archives have been purchased by the Duke University Special Collections Library. He lives in the Tuckasegee community of rural western North Carolina. www.newnativepress.org

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