Tricycle | Awake in the World

 “After a heavy, clinging snow,
snow falling from pine trees,
I like to watch,” said the Zen Master,
“a large rib of snow
falling from a high branch,
then how it bounces off, cascades
through lower branches,
sometimes to fall sudden, sometimes slow,
like the two types of Zen:
the flash card koan,
the settling down of zazen:
sudden,
          gradual.”

Dick Allen is the Connecticut State Poet Laureate. His seventh poetry collection is the Zen Buddhist-oriented Present Vanishing: Poems, winner of the Connecticut Book Award for Poetry.

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