This is a new piece, literally just finished it so it’s a bit wobbly like jelly but I think it’s set. I started the first notes on it about a month back – I had returned from a week-long retreat where I had been writing and meditating every day, Buddhist meditation including metta bhavana practise, which is the deliberate cultivation of compassion. All through the retreat I had experienced extreme pain across my upper back and arms when meditating, a very blocky feeling, and I knew it was all part of feeling a little shut down in my heart. Then on the last day our meditation leader started off a session by saying ‘remember, love is waiting to come through you’ and I immediately felt a bellow of love roar through me from back to front like a fire hose, opening up my chest until I cried helplessly. It left a kind of exit wound so that for days after coming home I was continually finding myself overcome with compassion, in the most unlikely (and inconvenient) places – in this case, late night shopping at Asda.
Love is waiting to come through you
brutal a wolf wind at the automatic doors it will
shove you a trolley through their parting and in
to the realm of nested baskets buckets brimming
bright bouquets destined for vases or lampposts
stacks of flapjacks black gossip pagodas where
turbine girls stride on the newsprint seas arms
bent back white vanes semaphoring they too
are on special offer but to who? love is waiting
to jackknife your sternum and make you see
the young man twitching without rhythm or
symmetry agonizing over Icebergs, Romaines
the old man palming his wife like a fresh egg
misbuttoned tweed hunched high in sympathy
for her lifelong rocking cross a scoliotic spine
the biker trachea shockingly stoppered white
plastic porthole in his windburned wattle love
is waiting to escape from you clawing a way
out of the shattered mineshaft joining them
under inert gases in closed cup mushroom faces
and the struggle with choices crunchy or plain
shivering in the aisles of flayed shrink-wrapped
muscles seeking comfort in the varnished apples
and beyond the unmanned tills are singing please
please take please take please take your change
Kirsten Luckins 