It Is Easy Poem by James Murdock

It is easy to see your higher self, shining
in the sunlight of your mind,
while sipping tea and watching a frozen mountain
from under a blanket in a rocking chair.
But when night falls and you wander away
from your fireside and your poetry,
isn't it easy to trip in the dark?

It is easy to lose yourself in the world of oceans
washing dead fish onto polluted shorelines
—people who think about the end also live it.
We are missing now a chance at newness.

It is not so easy to see that a change has been made,
and I mean made in the sense that someone made it,
until it knocks at the gate of your heart—when
your heart has been waiting for the moment
that catastrophe will find a home within it.

The hardest of these is to learn that each beginning
plants the seed of an end and each end that of
a beginning—that start leads to start and that
there was never a hell made outside the mind.