Praise-Song To My Body Poem by Daniel Brick

We both have and are our bodies.
Gabriel Marcel

Where does the center of my being
reside? It must be a place either
very close but hidden, or in plain view
but impossibly distant. Or perhaps the center
drifts between those extremes, stopping
along the continuum which holds them apart,
staying only a few moments at each place
of rest, ever shifting its appearance
and behavior, so my heavy mind is stumped,
my indulgent eyes roaming elsewhere, my soul
too preoccupied with salvation to care.
What does that leave to be the center?
My body, are you that elusive center?
I know wha you are: senses and sensations;
flesh stretched over bone, the soft and
the hard in tandem; your sensitivity to
climate and weather, your sojourns in Hell
and Heaven; your stories and tales
in the world; your health and your sickness.
I have been neither your master nor
your servant: I am closer to a friend
who abandoned repeatedly your long-standing
fidelity. You were the pale dwarf planet
against the blazing firmament of mind,
vision, soul. Are we strangers, or an estranged
couple? Listen at least my belated speech:
Forgive me, body I both own and am, I did not
realize your prestige in the scheme of things.
I ignored you for so long, puffed up with the vanity
of that trinity of mind, vision, soul. And now
as you dissolve into your old age, I suddenly
discover you were beautiful, you were always
truthful, you were always in the moment, without Zen
or Sufism, you found a centering place,
and you welcome all of me to reside here.