At Ch'ing Ch'ung Daoist Temple
San Francisco, California
we stack oranges on offering plates
without regard for seismic code.
What's tumbled and fallen
for millennia in China, still falls here:
quiet quake of chrysanthemum petals,
sudden scatter of sandalwood ash,
aftershocked tears of the living
lighting joss sticks for ancestors
whose photos line the walls.
Easy to see here
how quickly everything we love
goes up in smoke—
our major fault being
(not the San Andreas)
but our shakiness at remembering
the fragility of it all,
how each tectonic tick of time
clocking out from under us
is groundbreaking news.
Perhaps this is why
the white-haired grandmother
prays daily to deities who protect the home,
offers tea to many-armed Guan Yin
who holds five-thousand years
of history in place.
Home, temple, shrine,
what she bows to now is change,
the oldest tradition—
its myriad ups and downs
not at all unlike this city
undulating like a dragon,
good fortune that refuses
to hold still.
Daniel Skach-Mills’s poems have appeared in Sojourners, Soul Forte, The Christian Science Monitor, Sufi (Featured Poet), Braided Way, Open Spaces, and Kosmos Journal. His book, The Hut Beneath the Pine: Tea Poems was a 2012 Oregon Book Award finalist. In 2018, The Beyond Within: The Downtown Dao of Lan Su Chinese Garden was a finalist in The Body, Mind, Spirit Book Awards, and The National Indie Excellence Awards. A former Trappist monk, Daniel lives with his husband in Portland, Oregon, where he served fifteen years as a docent for Lan Su Chinese Garden.
Amethyst Review 