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Ch’an pictures I
They saw her as they came around the bend,
two black robed monks. She stood short of the ford,
dainty footed, silken kimono
splashed red against the mud and autumn dun.
Monju strode forward, lightly swept the girl up
into his arms, and crossed the murky stream.
He set her down beyond the muddy wheel-ruts.
Up, up the zigzag slope the shavelings trudged
in silence. They rested by their path, and still
no word between them. Kôgen fidgeted
and scowled. ‘We monks are not to have
anything at all to do with women.
You even lifted her across that creek.’
‘Are you still carrying that girl? –
I set her down a full half hour ago.’
Ch’an pictures II
Three junior monks sat quiet in the temple,
resolved to last the night in noble silence.
The spears of winter sun struck the spinning
dust motes – a dance to silent music from
the unstruck gong, an offering of powdered flame,
homage before the white-glazed, smiling Buddha.
Steady they sat in silence till that pallid
fire dimmed. The chamber dusked. Still
they sat, straight-backed, legs folded on the floor,
and hands correctly resting in their laps.
The chill from snow outside seeped slowly through
the living bone and knifed their shaven scalps.
Yet on they sat silent in the darkening.
A shadow rustled through that stillness. ‘Light
those lamps please.’ Li-mai’s voice exploded through
the darkness. Shards of shattered silence settled.
‘We are not supposed to speak’, Hui-neng
piped through fresh quiet. Before the acolyte
could flame the wicks, Lu-k’uan chimed in:
‘I am the only one who has not spoken.’
Murray Alfredson is a retired librarian and lecturer, who has also worked in Buddhist chaplaincy at Flinders University of South Australia. He has published poems and essays in Manifold, Cadenza, Reach, Ocean, Touch, the journal of healing, Overland, Eremos and other journals and anthologies in Australia, the USA, Canada and the UK, and a poetry collection, “Nectar and light,” in Friendly Street new poets, 12. (Adelaide: Wakefield Press and Friendly Street Poets, 2007.) He has won a High Beam Poetry Award in 2004, and the Poetry Unhinged Multicultural poetry prize in 2006 and has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. A second collection, The gleaming clouds, is forthcoming in 2013.
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