! ! Today Poem by Michael Shepherd

Today

(Mark it in the diary -
then throw the diary away..) :

Today dawned with the unusual
wrapped intriguingly in the familiar;
a freshness unidentifiable;
a promise, that promised
nothing specific:

as if I walk in a world
whose infinite complexity
is no problem;
its multiplicity, a straightforward matter;

which delivers something hoped for
and yet never formulated with real meaning:
simplicity;

here and now, yet feels eternal;
a heavenly sense of down-to-earthness;
a freedom that can’t remember
what it’s freed from;

where activity only seems
to tell one more of stillness,
and noise just sings of silence;

a day that’s a gift, without
a need to ask, or to receive;
where surrender is instantaneous, and continual,
and barely worth the mention;
where paradox is just a game;
where being, itself, is gratitude enough;

a day that says, this is how things are;
this is how it is... raising a quizzical eyebrow
and the hint of a smile:
you thought it otherwise..?

a day that deserves a new-coined word
to mark it as exceptionally
unexceptionable: the word has
spoken of itself:
onefulness..

for the gift of just being is beyond
all thoughts of giver and receiver;
it’s a day that promises to itself and myself,
what it delivers right now
in each present moment –

the indescribably magnificent,
glorious, who-would-have-guessed,
strangely familiar, and yet utterly new,
sense of the ordinary.