This poem, I just wrote it.
And I feel very uncertain about it,
but I think I would like to read it as like the end.
And it's a poem I wrote after a healer put his hands on me,
a Korean doctor who does a strange pressure therapy called
shiatsu.
The poem is called "The Buddha Radiant."
"When the healer put his hands on me,
practicing an ancient art of pressure therapy,
it seemed that he transmitted a message
that I saw as the Buddha, and understood that the Buddha was
not a person, but a shape of inner space, a reshaping
of inner space that heals from within;
that the statue we know so well is not a figure to worship,
an idol, not the statue of a man really,
but a meditation tool, a system of healing;
that that seated pose in its proportions
is a harmonizing image in the mind and body
to free us from tension and bring us grace.
A vision of at-oneness, encompassing the sexes,
it has something of a large child,
the human being at its softest and most divine, and also
of the mother, that tranquil image of tenderness,
not at all like Christ, twisted in agony.
With the doctor's hands magnetic on me,
I understood that words were unnecessary.
And in any case, he did not speak my language.
For it as a teaching image, a demonstration
of not holding on anywhere, allowing the energies
to flow that releases the punished self, the deprived,
the held back, the denied, the lowly self.
And we find the fullness of ourselves
in every part, the roundnesses, the plumpnesses, the smiles,
the thereness, taking the idea, thy will be done,
and pulsing with it like a purring cat, conductor
of energy, generator of love.
We could not speak to each other, the doctor and I.
But I received this teaching and blessing through his hands,
when into my mind came the Buddha radiant."
[APPLAUSE]