RIMONIN
16” x 20” scratchboard illustration of poem by Aurora Levins Morales, 2022
Selected Poems of Rimonim
Evening Prayer
Blessed are the tides of living that draw my body to rest and my soul to dreaming.
Let me lay the work of the world in the open hands of those still awake to the west of me, place in their palms the sickle and the spade, the needle and the shuttle, the pen and the ladle, the cell phone and the keyboard. Let me lie down in peace, as the mending of life rolls west and westward, hand to hand, village to village, through city after city, across fields and forests, deserts and oceans, moving upstream, against the planetary spin, for the dance of liberation never ceases, but keeps circling the world.
As I lie down, others rise up in a wave of intention and effort that moves in the wake of the sun, along the paths of daylight. So let my sleep be cradled in trust that others will carry what must be carried. Let my rest be unbroken by troubling thoughts or illusions of separation. Let me go down into sleep as into the arms of a beloved.
And let me rise in peace. Let me awaken to the light of a new day, and receive the work for which I was born back into my hands from those to the east of me, transformed by the many who have hammered and stitched and stirred while I slept, and whether the sun shines unveiled or is swathed in cloud, oh, radiant unruled life-force of the universe, may I behold the splendor of your indwelling light, which illuminates the world.
Asher Yatzar: Bless Our Bodies
Blessed is the evolutionary dance of life, which formed the human body in perfect wisdom, made cerebellum and cortex, made the many branching nerves, the bones and their marrows, the muscles and ligaments, the red cells and the white, the myriad hormones singing their biochemical song of praise, made eyes and ears, capillaries and fingernails, the magnificent heart with its chambers, all the organs and passages, cavities and openings. Blessed is natural selection and the infinite diversity of our shapes and colors, our forms and functions, and blessed is the ability to adapt, for it is well known and obvious that each one of us is made as we should be, that even though openings close, and closures open, even though limbs grow wildly and genes mutate, even though hearts dance to different drummers, lungs labor, bones bend and break, and biochemical signals go awry, even though we age and will someday die, we are infinitely splendid as we are. Blessed are you, life force of the universe, that has made us so varied and resilient.
In Praise of Guidance
Praise be to the life force that grew us from seed, from single cells floating in brine, and through all the miracles of evolution made us human beings, created to live together, created to share food and water, created to carry each other’s babies, created to tend and shelter each other. We praise the commandments of our true natures, to honor each other, to honor the earth and all that lives, to seek justice as plants seek the sun. We honor the gift of breath by living this day according to the deep commands of our creation, our original instructions.
Do Not Rise
This is my call to prayer:
do not rise,
do not brace your feet, calves, knees,
thighs, your whole tired selves to push
against gravity, against rest;
and do not rise in spirit,
hurling yourself skyward,
but instead
lie down. Sink.
Open wide your hard working hands
and let go of all striving.
Let yourself fall
gently and completely
to earth.
Go down into the holy roots of being
where your prayers spread slowly
by aquifer and mycelium,
into the common ground,
or do not spread,
and enrich the soil of
exactly where you are,
then pray.
Made Of
We are made of the mineral dust of stars and every molecule of us burns with the memory of vastness and splendor. We are living constellations, minute fiery suns, each of us with our orbiting miraculous worlds, our silent moons, all born from the hunger of atoms to embrace. Our light reaches beyond us, through the beautiful dark, through the universe without end. Everything that exists, has existed, will ever exist in all the unimaginable folded flower of time is holy, and there is nothing ever and anywhere that is not God.
We are made of earth, small seeds, dreams of photosynthesis, curled inside brown husks, made to crack painfully from our shells, to push heavy soil aside, to move, stubborn and fragile toward our destinies, into sun and rain. To break and grow green, break and flower, to be trees of life, and fall broken onto the ground becoming rich humus full green unbroken dreams. Everything that is, we turn into ourselves and give back as soil. Give back as oxygen. What we breathe is each other. Nothing that lives is alone.
We are made of water: salty rivers run in our veins, lymph ebbs and swells, saliva and tears leak into the air and dry. We are always changing: wide seas into clouds, rain into puddles, rivers into muddy fields that run along ditches into the sea. We flow, freeze, boil, rise, disperse, are hurled this way and that. We declare that we are the blue edge of glaciers, the great ocean swell, stagnant teeming ponds, months long tropical downpours, the delicate tracery of frost on a dry leaf, rusty drip of a faucet. We are the shape of what’s happened to us. We are caught up in doing, and whirl through our lives, suffering, joyful, filled with doubt. And yet we return to ourselves again and again, to the Self that is all there is. We are made of water, called to find our true level by that great force of love we call gravity. We are made to trust our destination. We are not lost.
Hechos de
Estamos hechos del polvo mineral de estrellas y cada molécula nuestra arde con el recuerdo de
la inmensidad y el esplendor. Somos constelaciones vivas, diminutos soles ardientes, cada uno de nosotros con nuestros orbitantes mundos milagrosos,
nuestras lunas silenciosas, todos nacidos del hambre de los átomos por abrazar.
Nuestra luz llega más allá de nosotros, a través de la hermosa oscuridad, a través del universo sin fin.
Todo lo que existe, ha existido y existirá en toda la inimaginable flor plegada del tiempo es sagrado,
y no hay nada, nunca y en ningún lugar, que no sea Dios.
Estamos hechos de tierra, pequeñas semillas, sueños de fotosíntesis, enroscados dentro de cáscaras marrones, hechos
para salir dolorosamente de nuestras cáscaras, para hacer a un lado la pesada tierra, para movernos, tercos y frágiles,
hacia nuestros destinos, hacia el sol y la lluvia. Para romper y reverdecer, romper y florecer, para ser árboles
de la vida, y caer rotos sobre la tierra convirtiéndonos en abundante humus lleno de sueños verdes intactos.
Todo lo que es, lo convertimos en nosotros mismos y lo devolvemos como tierra. Lo devolvemos como oxígeno. Lo que respiramos es el otro. Nada que viva está solo.
Estamos hechos de agua: por nuestras venas corren ríos salados, la linfa refluye y se hincha, la saliva y las lágrimas
se filtran en el aire y se secan. Siempre estamos cambiando: los amplios mares se convierten en nubes, la lluvia se convierte en charcos,
los ríos se convierten en campos fangosos que corren paralelos a las acequias camino al mar. Fluimos, nos congelamos, hervimos, nos elevamos, nos dispersamos,
somos arrojados de un lado a otro. Declaramos que somos el borde azul de los glaciares, el gran oleaje del océano,
los estanques quietos y repletos, los aguaceros tropicales que duran meses, el delicado trazo de la escarcha sobre
una hoja seca, el goteo oxidado de un grifo. Somos la forma de lo que nos ha sucedido. Estamos atrapados
en el hacer, y nos arremolinamos en nuestras vidas, sufriendo, alegres, llenos de dudas. Y, sin embargo, volvemos a
nosotros mismos una y otra vez, al Ser que es todo lo que hay. Estamos hechos de agua, llamados a encontrar
nuestro verdadero nivel por esa gran fuerza de amor que llamamos gravedad. Estamos hechos para confiar en nuestro destino.
No estamos perdidos.