Children at play give personalities to lifeless objects, and
we don’t need to give up that pleasure as we grow older. Poets are good at
discerning life within what otherwise might seem lifeless. Here the poet Peter
Pereira, a family physician in the Seattle
area, contemplates a smiling statue, and in that moment of contemplation the
smile is given by the statue to the man. [Introduction by Ted Kooser.]
The Garden Buddha
The Garden Buddha
Gift of a friend, the stone Buddha sits
zazen,
prayer beads clutched in his chubby
fingers.
Through snow, icy rain, the riot of spring
flowers,
he gazes forward to the city in the
distance—always
the same bountiful smile upon his portly
face.
Why don’t I share his one-minded
happiness?
The pear blossom, the crimson-petaled magnolia,
filling me instead with a mixture of
nostalgia
and yearning. He’s laughing at me, isn’t
he?
The seasons wheeling despite my
photographs
and notes, my desire to make them pause.
Is that the lesson? That stasis, this holding
on,
is not life? Now I’m smiling, too—the late
cherry,
its soft pink blossoms already beginning to
scatter;
the trillium, its three-petaled white
flowers
exquisitely tinged with purple as they
fall.
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright © 2007 by Peter Pereira. Reprinted from What’s Written on the Body by Peter Pereira,
