Indra’s Net

We sit like five points of a star,
until silence thins the veil of God.
Cathy in her steadiness reads
poems and scripture, snatches of essays
and stories teeming in intent and theme.

I am reminded of Indra’s Net,
the mythical fabric hung in the heavens
that stretches in all directions with jewels
at each fiber’s juncture. Each eye is a perfect,
singular gem, each reflects all the others:
infinity to infinity: everything holds everything,
splashed against the sky.

One by one, we speak to carve again
the opaque stones of our hiddenness,
reflecting facets that keen-edged life
has etched, each cut at a critical
angle with just the right amount of slant
for light to shoot forth to needle
a shining network shawl of meaning,
and we huddle into one
another’s words to warm
the chill of an indifferent world.

We are the power
we can see in one another’s lives,
diamonds of the first water,
each holding all, all holding each,
all, both catchers and caught, and
luminous, in the net of all wisdom.

-Kitty Yanson