Visual Meditation: “I want what I love to continue to live”

When I die, I want your hands on my eyes:
I want the light and wheat of your beloved hands
to pass their freshness over me once more:
I want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.

I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep.
I want your ears still to hear the wind, I want you
to sniff the sea’s aroma that we loved together,
to continue to walk on the sand we walk on.

I want what I love to continue to live,
and you whom I love and sang above everything else
to continue to flourish, full-flowered:

so that you can reach everything my love directs you to,
so that my shadow can travel along in your hair,
so that everything can learn the reason for my song.

-Pablo Neruda

(photos of peace cranes sent in from around the world taken at Tribute World Trade Center and the cemetery at St. Paul’s Chapel — the place where recovery workers went to recover themselves, although the graves are not of 9/11 victims — bottom 3 smallest images are of the Ground Zero site itself, from my trip this past March)

-Christine Valters Paintner @ Abbey of the Arts

** Come back on Monday for our 20th Poetry Party! **