by David Dephy

“If I tell you one of the things 
which he told me; you will pick up
the stones and throw them at me, 
a fire will come out of the stones 
and burn you up.”

The Apocryphal Gospel of Thomas

*
How can we count the light years between us, 
if we cannot feel their distances? What if we sense
them as our own breath? Perhaps impermanence
will compel us to leave memories behind?

Perhaps we carry them into the future? 
The old man sits under the tree. I see his calmness. 
I can feel his calmness as my own breath. 
I do not know who he is. I only know that 

He sits under the tree, 214 Brooklyn Avenue, 
Crown Heights, New York, and looks at me as he had 
a lot of glory days in his life. I can feel seconds—
that can happen right now when we feel life 
as the key to life itself, through the seeing 
of naked visions, transcend all the centuries, 
all the seconds of life—
not allowing our fears to define us. 

This is the day the wish of him had made. Let him rejoice 
and be glad in it, with or without the crowd around him.
He still looks at me through the crowd as if he says:
“We are wearing the inside out. Do you really want to know 
the biggest secret in the world? The meaning of life. 
It is just to be alive. It is so plain. The present is the only 
real time. Do you really want to know why’ve we rushed 
around? As if there were something to achieve beyond 
of our hearts. The present is the only real place when all 
the lot is what we got, what we wear, what we are.”  
I see now what he said, first, “I am God.” Second, he said,
“You are God.” Third, he said, “All of you are God.”

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David Dephy is a tri-lingual Georgian-American award-winning poet and novelist, multimedia artist. An author of Eastern Star (Poetry. Adelaide Books, New York 2020), he lives and works in NYC. Many of his poems have been published in the USA and all over the world. His poetry books in the Georgian language, Easter Verses and Poet King, have been included in Divine liturgy at the Evangelical-Baptists Church in Georgia, officially.