Leap before you Look

The steps that freeze us, The illusion of barbed wire,
The sheer agony of becoming who we are,
Like a yawn, a stretch, a chasm,
You stare into the abyss of freedom,
And it stares into you,
Side by side,
With the birds on the runway,
Waiting for something to happen,
Forever watching a looping film,
Waiting for it to come to us,
We pray for the courage to take a tiny step,
We pray for the fresh air of liberation,
We pray for support and strength and grace,
As into an open future we fall.

(I recently had the pleasure of attending a workshop with the 'corporate poet', David Whyte, who kept me spellbound for a whole day with his love of words, rythym and intonation. One of the poems he recited to us and my favourite of the day was called 'Start Close in' - you can check it out at http://www.panhala.net/Archive/Start_Close_In.html . 'Leap before you Look' has a similar message to 'Start Close In'. They are both poems about the first, terrifying step - the one you don't want to take - not the second or the third step, but the first step. They are both about finding your own path, not following 'someone else's heroics', creating your own destiny rather than 'waiting for something to happen', having the audaciousness to become that which only you are, not a pale imitation of someone else. Another 'sister' poem of 'Leap before you Look' is the poem posted earlier called 'Birds on the Runway'. The 'birds' appear again in this poem as a metaphor for the little things that get in the way of the big things. The phrase 'you stare into the abyss of freedom and it stares into you' is a shameless copy of Nietzsche's comment '...if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you' )