Right Concentration (poem)

Right Concentration

Is the world all rotation and roundness

Sunflower and sun

Hands lacking the callouses

that grow when work so often done, so mindless

Plays notes through windings of leathered furrows

as a songwriter without paper at hand

hums a tune again and again

but forgets, even so, how the passage went

Seeing seeing not at all, inward or outward

hearing hearing pink and white hues against the rain

rooting to a place of full circumference, noise on noise

Our tasks are birdsong in their way

Part of, and grooved within the world’s turning

Equanimity is not to be aware of nothing

But in the kindest way, to value nothing

Eightfold Path

Right Understanding

(2025, Stephanie Foster)