Applied Spirituality Moon

Applied Spirituality Moon

New Moon  March 29, 2025

If the rich win, the living will envy the dead.

            —Allan Sekula

Spring is the vase of nectar

poured toward the living earth

wild & free, available to all.

My prayer in this life is for that growing light

to illuminate great doubt & accompany

my tender heart-bud homeward

to reunite with all other perfect blossoms

who suffer for want of knowing beauty.

The poem hunches like that night heron

hunting by a traffic-jammed interstate at dusk

intent on subtle perturbations of enthralling water—

art is the fish, the combustion, the fury, compassion

& the vividness of space-as-womb.

Life-sustaining is a positive freedom

which is a burden because birth is hard

& freedom (which is love) is complicated:

free people must choose spirit over gasoline,

recognize the divisive power in the algorithm.

Free people go about making hard decisions

that transmute momentary discomfort

for the sake of honoring the real world

with all its confusing causes & conditions.

The moon is for mothers & their mothers

& their daughters of dark silken hair

who nourish the world as life-giving maidens

of the south—who sit up & proclaim

that the living must practice gratitude first.

Return to ground

earth proclaims

& be given heaven.

Poem by Qayyum Johnson.

Art by Suiko McCall.