Spotlight on Bewilderness Writer Taizan Alford

The Blue Hole 

The simple joys of sunshine and skinny dipping in the summer.
Blue skies, rolling hills filled with green grass - freshly mowed
Rolling down the hill of the levy like a log felled from the tree

Wondering how to return to the simplicity of a summer day with no plans except to swim in the blue hole. 

A swimming spot in the back forty
Up the levy- easy to miss if you don’t know it
Diving dive past what was known
The water gets colder the deeper I go
Wondering if an alligator gar will want to take a bite out of my toe as it touches the soft squishy  mud on the bottom 

Is there a bottom
Is there an end
To be touched
Where is the place that is deepest
Inside?
Is it death?
Is it birth?
Is it all the moments in between?
Or just the ones I notice
How can I notice - - the wonder
Here
Now
The blue hole may still be
There back in east Texas on someone else’s land. 

I hope there is a young person that can pull themselves away from tik tok and touch their toes  to the soft squishy mud of the unknown in the blue hole out by the levy and find the hidden
kisses of the dragon flies on the water. 

– T.W. Alford

An Imperfect Dream Takes Root 

Renouncing what has been expected of me 
Walking out of my expected life  
Into the horizon 
Past the walls of hate isolating so many in the land of my birth  

Quirky crooked streets guide my old crooked feet as I walk into the unknown. 

Blown past my fear 
Past the years of careful planning 
Into the vast landscape of that  
Which I know only a little. 
A tiny fraction of what’s here 
But, this tiny fraction is more  
Beautiful than I ever imagined it would be, could be  

How is it that fate and fear and fascism has brought me to a life 
Better than I would have, could have ever dreamed up for myself  

I do have a good dose of survivor’s guilt as I witness the fate of many of my fellows. I wonder if this is how
the Jews felt that escaped Germany
before the ovens burned their brothers.

– T.W. Alford

About the Author:

Taizan Alford has been writing poems and singing songs for over fifty years and lived in Wisconsin for the last thirty. He’s a Soto Zen priest and exploring a new life with his husband in Mexico.

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