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Transcending Silence

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by	robwalkerpoet
Featuring	Hektor Thillet, DoKashiteru
length	3:45
Recommends	Recommends (18)

Transcending silence…
My first thought was “Oh no! They’ve paired two poets!” I didn’t want to try to usurp Hektor Thillet’s themes or tone with my own work. Then I came across Silence, I’m failing, a beautiful song set to DoKashiteru’s simple piano melody Aimée which beautifully dovetailed with my poem to my late father, Jack Walker, titled transcendence.
Once again the Secret Mixter performs its magic - a completely unexpected result from a totally random pairing.

TRANSCENDENCE

two weeks ago in japan i sat on that Mountain
the bald young monk explaining zazen meditation
the release from past and future
and the silence of engyoji temple
teaching me the here/now
and here and now we sit in The Vales
a silence broken
by the eternal happiness of hi-5
on a blaring tv
which is everlasting
you my balding father
hair stolen not by time but radiation
you sit on the bed in your tracksuit pants
bulging with the incontinence nappy
below your buddha belly
your corporeal form shapeless as a toddler’s
i ask if you need anything
you don’t
all your physical needs met
in this daily malignant shallowness
the blastoma has excised your past
and your future is inoperable
you don’t remember who came yesterday
or what you ate for breakfast
you have achieved a kind of benign transcendence
only those around you
feel the eternal depths of sorrow
but you
are in the perpetual
Here and Now.

text © rob walker, 2010

from After the Race
(ed. Janine Baker & A. M. Sladdin)
Friendly Street Poets / Wakefield Press
ISBN 9781862548831
AUS, 2010