Love Poem: When We Were Eight
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Written by: Gerald Dillenbeck

When We Were Eight

When you were eight years old
waking to another perfect day's dawn
what potential did you discover
with your co-empathy integrity 
of left-deductive
with elder right inductive
communionations?

Who were you
as you stepped into morning's warm spring sun?

How were you one of "us"
and how many species were included
before  AnthroPrivilege was even born?

What voices were your first prophets 
of school year's end
and summer's leisurely recreation
of imagination?

How did you hear
former lives of love's future past
role play expansion?

Languishing loved laughter
replacing more challenging team sports
requiring a win-lose assumption,
and visual distinctions between
left space in right time.
invisible to your eyes?

What were you doing
lying flat on your stomach
in dutch clovered lawn's grasses?

Looking down into a miniature jungle
without water in dry riverbeds,
forest for ants 
and other insect tribes,
their neighbors
our troubled nations
and fragile ecosystems 
and polarizing monocultures 
supplanting contented climates of regeneration

Innocence
interrupted by great transitional revolutions,
critical economic and political issues 
with vast cooperative-global opportunities
lying between and within these panentheistic communications
from Earth's monolithic DNA/RNA non(0)-soul
 
Refractive creation stories,
some with advantages and risks and beauty
of flight,
landing lightly in grass-blade tree tops
as ants pursue more industrial economies
of richly nutritional value below,
sweet crystalline treasures

Jewels for QueenMother Gaia's healthy investment
in embryonic shabbat vocation
developing human naturally regenerative time 
enough for health optimization

Endosymbiosis of a new Earth generation
of flying and swarming occupiers,
Bodhisattva Warriors
for co-empathic peace
with interminable cooperative faith
in this integrity of nature's ecological jungle.

Where was your family-owned business
incorporating love
with truth and hope for more inclusive faith?

lFexible enough to include boys
vulnerably drawn to love other boys' eyes and skin
and hearts and mindbodies,
more than girls' laughter and light heartedness?

How did you invest your perfect humid August days,
breathing Lake Michigan's thick air,
reading sultry Gone With The Wind
in wonder of such rich sensual diversity
of spirit and unnatural ownership,
of WinLose disasters disguising entitled stupidity
of nobility both within and despite poverty
of mendacity both within and despite superfluously competitive wealth
commodifying even beauty
and power
and nobility
and darkly rich fertile race?

Why did you love this embracing place
of multigenerational space,
your private familial sangha farm
balancing your bicameral heart and lungs
mind and limbs in love's familial
yet often over meat-headed,
overcooked-vegetative embrace?

Touchy about gay-filled grace
so that no other place
could ever bring this transubstantiating home again,
so that each other space
might ever bring this spring moment 
back to polycultural home regained?

When we were eight
still remembering embryonic Outside/Inside
MotherEarth's mediating streams of dreams,
Time's co-passioned econsciousness.