Laura Sweeney
On Practicing Japanese Zen
(Honest House, Yukuhashi City, Japan 2023)
I need stillness and silence, he said.
I don't want to see you. Go to your room
and stay there. I think of the white birds
on the creek outside his bedroom window
and the joggers and dogs running by. I think
he wants no ripples no waves. I think
"Be gentle" as he asked me to be of him.
I think of him bringing me a cup of
chamomile tea. Staring out my window
trying to find my own stillness and silence.
Bio
Laura Sweeney facilitates Writers for Life in Iowa and Illinois. She represented the Iowa Arts Council at the First International Teaching Artist's Conference in Oslo, Norway. Her poems and prose appear in seventy plus journals and seventeen anthologies in the States, Canada, Britain, Indonesia, and China. Her recent awards include a scholarship to the Sewanee Writer's Conference. She is a PhD candidate, English Studies/Creative Writing, at Illinois State University.