Lung

Breathe, the well-lunged like to say.
Breathe deeply. Breathe normally. Count
Your breaths like children counting clouds
Or climbers counting Moki steps.

Feel the way the world's within you,
The way you embody the world.
What could be simpler or richer,
Holier or closer to life

Than the simple act of breathing?
But there's a secret in the breath.
It's the most desperate hunger
We have that we can choose to sate.

The heart is beyond our control,
Or beyond control's illusion.
No human ever ate or drank
Anything continuously,

Certainly not as means to peace,
And food and water anyway
Are more often hard to come by
Than the airs we drag in and out.

But, huge multicellular beasts
And ecosystems that we are,
Lumbering around out of the sea,
Using breath as tool and signal,

We forget all too easily
That this one regularity
Pulling oxygen deep within
Our cellular communities

Is our core currency, first food,
Before water or sugar or fat.
Long before micronutrients
Could run low, our bodies need air

For fuel, for resources, for life
Lived out of the wet, for access
To all the other things we need
And all the things we need to say.

This is not simple, sitting here
Under Corinthian birches,
Beside roaring Enterprise Creek,
Breathing, breathing this sweetness, breeze.