Writing Zen
Poetry has long been an expression of the dharma: The poet perceives ordinary phenomenon, a feeling or vision, then extends that perception to another dimension beyond the ordinary, and in that process, a new unifying insight is experienced, a harmonious merging of the extraordinary and the ordinary.
Margarita Juteki Delcheva practiced at the Village Zendo from 2008 to 2016. In California, she has coordinated the Zen in Isla Vista sitting group. Here, Margarita adds her voice to the expression of the Way.
Margarita Delcheva is a poet, performer, and PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she teaches at the College of Creative Studies and the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies. Her interests include contemporary Eastern European art and performance, Minimalism in literature and art, re-enactment theory, and the legacy of postmodern choreographers. Margarita is a founding editor at Paperbag, an online poetry and art journal, created in 2009. Her poetry book The Eight-Finger Concerto was published in Bulgaria in 2010.
Pilgrimage
By Margarita Delcheva
Little by little, the ocean
swallowed me
Little by more, the dust
on the carpet swallowed me
The ceiling padding
I tumbled onto it
My feet tickled
the crown of a tree
My voice entered
your stomach
To listen with the eye
you said
With the hand
with the ends of your hair
Jiuhuashan you said
a bus of grey-robed monks
The teaching of the wall
and mortar with five senses
I became the geese
not one goose
the geese
Another Recipe for Getting Lost
By Margarita Delcheva
I often go walking in places I normally don’t
because I expect you might be there.
Your heavy hat erasing your eyebrows
and the ridiculous cravat of rolled musical papers
you hold so close.
The grandpa over there cannot stop
clapping and singing for the grandson’s picture
even after it’s too late and the boy has crossed the ocean.
The birds have their own traffic lights
for walking across the lawn.
Le Carrousel’s tra-la-la
moves even the riderless horses.
One of them has a really long mane,
which is confused when the whole thing
up and turns.
It doesn’t know whether to trail in a circle
or stick out behind straight as a beam.
Forecast
By Margarita Delcheva
The storm I sent for you walks
on the tips of the pines.
Still visible from space
because the light bulbs are different,
the divide between East and West Berlin
is a kind of Milky Way
for lost agrarian planes.
The rain first is heard,
then felt. A figure
in the red truck
between the tall firs.
It has not come for your
suitcase with the straps.
I never took off the tiny
glove from that winter.
I grew up.
My hand squeezing the memory
still the hand of a little girl.
Another Recipe for Getting Lost and Forecast first appeared in While You Wait: a Collection of Santa Barbara Country Poets.