Lawful Body
Someone or I built me a body
to serve as my earthly house,
which, so long as I respect her laws,
carries me without complaint.
Whoever I am wants too much
sometimes and overstrains my body
by climbing to futile heights
or pleasuring too much,
but body keeps me legal,
staging strikes and slowdowns,
suing for her rights
through ills and pains.
All around me I see
billions of other bodies too,
each tethering her curious occupant
from straying too far into folly.
Lawful body constrains caprice
with motherly insistence until,
strained and weakened, body herself
gravitates into a waiting grave.
When earth-given body releases me
and melts again into her humid earthy matrix,
I will float freely to an ethereal electricity
to greet forgotten shining friends.
Dust falls to greater dust, indeed,
but soul buoys up to radiant Soul
like a child rushing gratefully armward
into all it knows of the maternal Eternal.