Poetry

by Hannah Cooke-Ariel and Paul R. Fleischman, MD

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The Last Leaf

By Hannah Cooke-Ariel

Hannah Cooke-Ariel, Doctor of Pharmacy, Professor of Pharmacy Practice, Massachusetts College of Pharmacy in Boston. Hannah specializes in integrative medicine, with an interest in the mind-body connection and cardiovascular health. She currently is a member of the content editorial board for the Boston-based Natural Standard Research Collaboration.
Contact: arielh@bellsouth.net 

You Can Never Speak Up Too Often For the Love of All Things
Sweet Pond, Guiford, Vermont, May 31, 1999 – MemoriaL Day
By Paul R. Fleischman, MD
From his book, You Can Never Speak Up Too Often For the Love of All Things, Onalaska, WA: Pariyatti 2004

You can never speak up too often for the love of all things.
For every living thing or natural place on earth, there is someone
          who wants to kill or destroy it;
Therefore, you can never speak up too often for the love of all things.
 
These families of geese that I watch as I sit beside the pond,
Two pairs, four adults, with their clutches of downy gosllngs
          who are carefully sheltered between the
          tall-necked, attendant goose and gander,
There is a hunter who yearns to kill them,
Who feels entitled to his killing of them,
Who would be outraged if you implied he had no right to
          gun them down in season.

This pond, set like an opal in the precious ring of earth,
          windsparkling among shaded forests of hemlock and pine,
There is someone waiting to race his motorboat across it,
          knifing the soft skin of its silence,
          leaking oil into its pearl waters;
          develop it, build beaches,
          bring in crowds with boomboxes surging across
          macadamized parking lots;
Therefore, you can never speak up too often for the love of all things.

All beings spring up from the same womb of life.
Sunlight strikes the earth, plants catch it, and as they hold light
          in their secret birthing place,
The embryo of life unfolds in their leaves and seeds.
This green gift of light becomes the food that feeds
          the worlds of birds and beasts and men.
All beings share the same joy that flows in the company of other lives.
All beings share the same tremor in the face of death.
Therefore, you can never speak up too often with the love of all things.

The silence found throughout the world in evening ponds,
          unbroken forests, mountain-enfolded ravines,
          hilltops at dusk,
Is not an absence of noise, but a presence.
In the company of silence, people hear more clearly the passage of eternity,
          rustling between the lattice of the cells of their own mind,
          like wind through a screen.
In the calm of silence – as if its arms were folded, and a presence were waiting,
          watching, patiently devoid of impulse or haste – 
People hear the common tongue of love, the universal language
          of mortal things, soft, like a baby's voice,
          passing from person to person, pulsing from
          trees and grass and animals, connecting
          existence with existence.
Through the universal silent sound of mortal joy, individual
          life becomes bonded, tolerable, and touched.
Aware of this,
You can never speak up too often with the love of all things.

In the heart of every hunter, silence breaker, mass murderer, taker
          of life big or small
Is static.
Due to this static, they cannot hear the voices of all things babbling,
          crying, speaking from the heart;
Due to this static, some people cannot hear the way that tall grass stems
          sing lullabies to their neighboring grass; or
          the ways that birds, anxious, fretful, diligent,
          chase after their new-flown fledglings with
          morsels of food, or with admonitions of danger.
Those who are bedeviled by the static give it names that please them.
They befriend and flatter the static; calling it god, praising it as
          a folkway or as an heirloom.
They say the power of the static in their minds exempts them from the laws of love.
The deer hunter feels enthroned above the animals - he has forgotten,
          lost touch with, cannot feel the way the
          doe turns to nuzzle along in haste the fawn,
          heart-beating, eager to spur it on towards
          safety.
The terrorist, ethnic cleanser, nationalist, religionist, invoke the names
          and ideas of old books and imposing buildings.
They are deaf to the inaudible, dumb to the unspoken common tongue.
Listening to static and lost to love they kill the Jews of Europe, the Tutsis
          of East Mrica, the intelligentsia of Cambodia, the
          elephants of the Congo, the orangutans of Borneo, the
           Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic whales.
Killing is indiscriminate and everywhere, the excuse changes, the reason
          changes, the alleged necessity changes.
Therefore, you can never speak up too often for the love of all things.

Here is a pond on a summer afternoon, its water iridescent green
          and blue beneath the long bright solar rays,
And here is a young man and young woman dipping into the water,
          merging their bodies with the body of the pond.
From long ago they ran from hunters; as deer they ran from men with
          painted faces and burning torches in the
          Pleistocene night;
As rabbits they ran from dripping dogs;
For generations, their ancestors were Jewish runners, homeless here and
          there across the landmass of Europe, chased by
          people with a dozen different pedigrees. 
As Africans they came in chains.
As trees, they were cut down at their feet, and fell on their faces.

Today, the pond skin shimmers in ecstacy of love as the breeze draws
          its fingers across the water's surface.
The young man and the young woman dip into the pond's original and
          fathomless watery womb.
And their child, who years later comes to the pond, dives in
          all sweat and muscle, bull-necked from
          mowing in the field,
His jeans and hair are jumbled with hay stems of daisies and wild pinks.

For each and every presence, place, person, animal, plant, on this earth,
          there is someone who wants to kill or destroy them,
And there is also a great and universal love inside them, a love and
          joy entwined, like a young man after a day's
          work diving into a summer pond,
Like water, green, blue, dear, murky, impenetrably old primal element
          of life, catching him, bathing him, whispering to
          him unbeknownst to him himself, the secret and
          universal words:

          You can never speak up too often for the Love of all things.

Paul R. Fleischman, MD is a psychiatrist, life-long practitioner of Vipassana meditation, and author of Cultivating Inner Peace; The Buddha Taught Nonviolence, Not Pacifism; Karma and Chaos; The Healing Spirit; and Spiritual Aspects of Psychiatric Practice. Dr. Fleischman lives in Amherst, MA.  

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