Day 600 of the daily poems, a prestigious number, a prestigious day. 26 July 2024, the opening day of the Paris Olympics. But for today’s poem our poet Chrys Salt takes us away from Paris to the Far East, to the story of Yuan Gin, the Buddhist goddess of compassion. Yuan Gin struggled so hard to save such an enormous number of unhappy beings that her head split into eleven pieces, and Buddha, seeing her plight, gave her eleven heads with which to hear the cries of the suffering, and a thousand arms to reach out to all who needed aid. Our poet admonishes us to see inside ourselves to understand the need for compassion.
Yuan Gin, Compassion Goddess.
How many ears
to hear sound of sorrow?
How many eyes
to see all ways at once?
How many mouths
to shout into tomorrow?
How many arms
to shield these little ones?
Compassion’s not the stuff
of prayer or mantra,
It is not fashioned
out of clay or stone.
It is ourselves
reflected in love’s mirror,
the god inside ourselves
come home.
Chrys Salt
from Chrys Salt’s collection The Punkawallah’s Rope,
Indigo Dreams Publishing 2017