I am delighted to share another beautiful submission to the Monk in the World guest post series from the community. Read on for Christine Davis’s reflection and poem Life to Life.
In recent years, after deaths and losses, changes and griefs, I’ve moved farther and farther away from the traditional dogma I was raised under, and have grown increasingly impatient with what seems to me to be the empty use of religious jargon; the way words like ‘God’ are thrown around void of any true meaning, as if the terms themselves are idolized instead of being understood as signposts to truth. In this struggle, I’ve attempted to define and understand who ‘God’ really is in a way that is meaningful to me, beyond the religious baggage layered on the term. Pondering this question in meditation, I turned to God’s claim to Moses, “I am who I am.” As a writer and grammar nerd, this statement is fascinating to me. “I am,” of course, is the present tense of the verb ‘to be.’ To be – I am, you are, he is, I was, you were, you will be, I am being, you are being, God is being. It occurs to me that God is the ‘is’ in all that is. God is the part of me that ‘is,’ the part of you that ‘is,’ the part of nature that ‘is.’ God is what makes us ‘be.’ God is the ‘be’ part, the verb of being alive, the you and the me and the is-ness between us. As I pondered this beingness and wondered what it had to do with my own life, this story and resulting poem came to me. It’s written in haibun form, a Japanese prose-poem form that traditionally combines prose and haiku. My haibun is a sonnet-haibun, as I’ve combined prose with a sonnet. I hope you find it meaningful.
When I was young, I mucked horse stalls in exchange for riding time with a Quarter Horse named Calypso. I loved her chestnut back, white face and forearms, chocolate brown eyes. One hot July day with the sun high and the wind still, my horse and I cantered across a field. Flying.
Halfway, Calypso stopped. My body did not.
I landed flat on my back, like a flipped pancake.
The landing sounded thunk. I lost my breath and lay on the ground with my eyes closed for the longest moment as I wondered if I was dead. My fingers felt the prick of the grass blade tips and I smelled the sticky sweet scent of that same grass. When I finally peeked, I saw the sky and her white puffy clouds, soaring birds, ravens, wingspan coasting,
heard their distant croak calls, watched shining sun,
north-drifting clouds, sky never-ending
across the horizon, blue on and on.
Prisons of my mind, like ghosts,
floated far far away. I thought how John Donne
foretold death’s ending pride riposte.
In darkened shadows, life’s on the run.
The ground beneath lay firm, flowers budded pink,
purple feathers floated skyward.
I wish I could say I’d sparked a holy jubilee,
but maybe I saw a cosmic wink,
mythic goddesses inspired.
This morning, our Yoshino cherry
blossoms exploded like popcorn kernels encased in velvety pink softness, and butterflies gorged themselves on the first nectar of spring. I looked at the sky and clouds, sun shining on blades of grass, and ran my fingers over the tree, her scratchy smoothness, warmth, linked to an energetic buzzing sensation in my fingertips, connecting life to life.
Christine Davis is a writer, poet and artist from North Carolina, USA. Her poetry has been published in Moonstone Arts Center’s Neruda Anthology (2023, “My Dream”), Kakalak (2023, “Elegy for America”), The Autoethnographer (2023, “After the School Shooting, in a Death Denying World”), and Stardust Review (2023, “La Luna es Vida”), among other publications. Her poetry collection, Life and Death and Holy in Every Breath (Wild Rising Press) was published in 2024. Christine has studied poetry with poets Judyth Hill, Rusty Morrison, David Koehn, Jessica Jacobs, and Morri Creech. Her writing explores her experiences with death and dying, spirituality, and social justice and compassionate living. She is a participant in the Charlotte Center for Literary Arts’ Author’s Lab, where she is writing her memoir about her experience living in Ireland to research the Magdelene Laundries, search for her ancestors, and find herself. She has participated in, and been inspired by, several of Abbey of the Arts’s pilgrimages in InisMor, Galway, and Perth, Scotland.
