Excerpt from Six Ways of Looking upon Buddha Nature by Beth Walker

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The following poem appears in our upcoming Fall/Winter 2020 issue. Subscribe today to read the rest of Beth’s poem and the entire issue.

1.
Buddha probably knew
      but forgot to mention
             someone has to pay the bills

buy eggs and milk
      drop the kids at school
             and remember them later.

Center yourself in that, he’d say.

2.
Nothing is important
and everything matters:

this mystery that keeps
you awake.

3.
Collect your tears in colorless jars.
      Line them up.

See how their cracks
      bend the sunlight.

4.
Don’t sin against your talent.

      Let teaching be your penance.

      Let silence be your teacher.

Beth WalkerBETH WALKER’S work has recently appeared in Persephone’s Daughters, Still Points Arts Quarterly, Storm Cellar, and South85, among others. A piece of flash fiction was a top ten finalist in this year’s Hemingway Shorts fiction competition, sponsored by the Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park.

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