Renunciation - April 8 2025

 

Renunciation

April 8 2025

A few days into the fast

the hunger left me.

I don’t know if the body adjusts

or the mind lets go.

But either way

there’s something to be said for freedom from want,

a clarity and patience

I never felt before.

But body and mind are separate,

and mine was an old man

with stiff joints and porous bones

who couldn’t get warm

and had awful breath;

even I could tell how bad.

I still thought about food, often fantasized,

but with more detachment than urgency.

Odd, what you can do without.

So just how stripped down

can life become?

What belongings shed

wants dispensed with

essentials reassessed?

And all those beliefs

I so fiercely hold,

clinging to them like life rafts

that declare who I am

I can’t let go of.

What would become of me

unencumbered by such shibboleths?

Would I feel liberated

or would I panic,

stripped down, and shivering

naked and exposed?

Inevitably, though, the fast would have consumed me,

my fat burned through

organs eaten

bones leached;

with the brain, protected or not, next.

Its insatiable appetite

is like a starving scavenger,

gnawing at the bone

until nothing is left.

When only hunger will rescue me.

Only surrendering

to the want, desire, and greed

I thought I could live without,

the envy, longing, and lust

I thought I could be free of.