A Provocation 
     for Cameron

It is as simple as this:

Say the old prayer of rough love

As John Donne prayed

“Batter my heart—three-chambered God”

Open both arms, fall towards the ground

Like one of those fainting goats in a trust fall

Until the true shape of your own face appears.

   or perhaps--

Call forth the Body Electric of Walt Whitman’s poem--

Come back to a place even

Before the seed of you began. 

There was once a me, a you; even the I/ Thou

 Jewish mystic Martin Buber writes of so lovingly;

along with Yahweh, Buddha, Lord Shiva, Mohammed

indeed, a host of heavenly others.

Every assortment of faith on your lips prospered, then;

even the agnostic and atheist tenets rang true.

Then, as now, prophets will come forth in the land.   

Did you know that Moses

was modest? He did not view himself as a prophet.

Moses shrank back from his calling; yet it came to pass that, even as a fetus,

blindly, he fingered moist, uterine walls with comfort but hesitation—

indeed, what else might be possible? He pondered.

What else might be born?

Eventually, he stepped off into the burning bush;

they say, his fervor lay in his clapping hands. Everything was in reach of his

clapping hands, he discovered.

Why, happiness is in reach of anyone’s clapping hands, he said, incredulous.

 Even still Moses traverses mother earth, she

Bare-backed and supine, guarding our wounded selves.  

can be counted on to traverse tentatively with us

these wounded selves--fingering the scars of our neglect.

Feeling once again the tincture of its sting, the reprehensible

sting of any particular regretful act, including but most especially

forgotten acts against one another.

Bearing witness—

a forgotten act recedes even

while chiding us with our indifference—

we shirk our natures to look, turn aside our gaze.

but as if an invisible hand forces our heads straight forward,

then to.... look!

A dead and drowned Syrian child sears our conscience-- its image

retreats even as we wish to make it not so; if only it were a part of

what did not happen! 

The limpness in his body is unfathomable. Look at

the tennis shoes, so purposeful and carefully

placed on his small feet.  Someone, somewhere, loved this child, tended to his needs.

Dressed him for that fateful, last voyage. And he had a name! What was his name??

     “Dance, dance, wherever you may be, I am the Lord of the Dance, said he.”

So the body explodes, every cell wants to know what it doesn’t want to know. 

Sweating away the toxins, the formidable acts relished or not;

acts known or left as strangers on our shores. 

All the beheadings, rapes, fraudulent ways, small boys used as human shields--

it is so and more, but as if it were

settled, they will eventually come for you,

running will not suffice. 

Out of this cacophony of living dead visages

 "Body Jam," a jazz, dance sacrament takes form, 

Whitman's Body Electric revisited.

 Like Communion or Baptism or any other tribal ritual

it is this third entity we yearn toward, a kind of salvation .  

Very much a dynamic friend who 

enters a party, like a new idea hopping.  

And all relationships change.

The dance, Body Electric! Enters. All burning bushes ignite

within reach of our clapping hands.    

 Dance, dance, wherever you may be 
I am the lord of the dance, said he 
And I lead you all, wherever you may be 
And I lead you all in the dance, said he.