Minor Deities

The ant prays to both beetle and aphid.

Do you doubt that trees commune
through their roots like lovers
touching toes under the table?

We all sit on someone’s altar
and someone else’s killing floor.

We’re all aflame in this fight with fire.

A Word from Grandmother

Each day on my forest walk I pause
to press my palms against her skin,
the wrinkles on the backs of my hands
miniatures of her great ridges and ravines.

Each day I stand like that until she speaks,
blesses me with a single-word benediction.

Yesterday it was peace. Today it is patience.

A Bit Like Lilacs

We share this quiet morning space
in peace, the sleeping cat and I.
Sunlight catches the cobalt vase,

the purple buds that look a bit like
lilacs, my blue-veined hand that writes

these lines. All I ask is to see,
to breathe inside this mystery.

I've been meditating since I was in my teens and have studied with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Roshi Joan Halifax and other teachers. My practice changed in 2015 when I was gifted through Spirit with a new meditation technique. As it was downloaded to me during meditation over a series of months, it came to be called Open Gate Meditation, which is a self-guided "purification & renewal" technique.

Wayne Lee has worked as a commercial fisherman in Alaska, an actor/dancer/musician at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, a waiter at the Space Needle, an advertising executive in Seattle, a journalist for the Washington, D.C. Times and The Seattle Times, a fisheries marketing specialist in Indonesia and a public information officer for five different government agencies in Washington and New Mexico. He currently lives in Santa Fe, NM, where he works as a writer, editor, teacher, group facilitator, meditation instructor and dog-sitter.

Lee’s poems have appeared in Pontoon, Tupelo Press, The New Mexico Poetry Review, Slipstream and other journals and anthologies. He was awarded the 2012 Fischer Prize and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and three Best of the Net Awards. His collection The Underside of Light was a finalist for the 2014 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award. He is currently working on a full-length collection of septets.

More on Wayne Lee’s work can be found on our Links page.