How Can We Stop Asking?

A poem from the hills

Mural: Euclid Ave, Berkeley CA

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All these different skies,
how is it they are all the same sky?
How is it the seas that lend the sky
its blue are the same seas?

All these different peoples,
how is it we are all created in the divine image
when we ourselves fall and fail
to treat the divine divinely?

Is the sky itself not another face,
the seas not another face,
the weeping cedars and eucalyptus
bent in sorrow,

the roses refusing
to be anything but exquisite,
the children in the crossfire,
the music we all sing,

the joy we feel when we look
into the face of our beloveds —
is it not the same, is it not the same?

How can a person walk up a steep hill
under a sky without blemish
asking such innocent questions?

All of these questions,
are they not the same questions
some foolish poets have been asking in vain
for all of recorded time?

When will we learn
and what will we learn?

Such simple queries belong not to war,
not to the plague of refusing another
their fullest expression,
not to the sky and not to the seas,

not to the rose gardens or the lovers
who sit quietly or the children
who skip ahead or run for cover,
depending on where they were born.

Can one only speak of the divine image
from a distance, and how,
when it is never further than each of us?

Some say questions are shields,
but what if they are mirrors,
what if they are gates,
the only path that might ever lead to peace?

As long as there is breath in the body
how can we, under this same sky,
possibly stop asking?

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