The Deep Hours

Wayfaring Poems on the Themes of Self, Memory, Liberation, and World

image: Atsushi Tsubokura

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“Castor and Pollux”

Most see twin stars.

Moon-lit travelers
know them as cicada eyes.

———

“Back When”

Back 
when I was in love 
with the shimmering world
there was a girl.

I couldn’t speak her language
but I would’ve run off the ledge 
of a mountain to chase after her sunset.

Now the dark of night is my bride.

——

“Footfalls”
— to the First Peoples

I saw them today 
in the high hills.

Soft brown feet
shuffling their way
to the sun temples again
to renew the light of the world.

___


“Unhooking & the Sovereign Gaze”
– a scent trail

Woman: Deconstruct the Animus.

As the old feminist bumper sticker says:
You need a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

Brothers: Deconstruct the Anima.

Do you really want to wander 
all the years of your days
being pulled on by tethers and hooks?

We’re not taught to break this trance
but the “ideal inner image”
is the only scent trail you need.

The world is filled with playboys and sorceresses.

Do you not think 
this is what the Buddha was talking about 
when, in the presence of Mara’s alluring daughters,
he cast his eyes downward, and said:
“The Earth is my witness. I am liberated…”?

——

“Offerings From the Heart-Mind of the Thunder Mother”

Delicate moss.
Quiet trickle of crystalline water.
Invisible stream-fed world.

Hard to believe
the Thunder Mother
made all this
with nothing but a few
slivers from the silver dawn.

Her teaching 
remains the same 
after all these years:

Memories become 
all the more precious
when you realize 
they are fading.

___

“By Crook Rather Than Hook”

If you step out
into the night air
and it is thick with dust
nestle your face
into the sleeve
of your Dark-Enigma robe;

be filled
with the deep, sheltered breath
of the ancients.

We 
Are 
Them.

Right there
both arms bent at the crook
hands resting in your lap
is relief from these war-torn winds.

Remember 
the line from the 
old Wayfaring song:

Go to and fro 
as you must,
as you must,
but don’t abide 
in the clammer
of the red dust.

Just this 
just this single breath of return
can put your Heart-Mind
back on the Way.

It’s why we incense our robes.

It’s why some
put cypress oil in their hair.

It’s why we present
the ‘All’ of ourselves
to the pageantry
of the sing-song dawn.

It’s all to remind ourselves
that the edict of this hard world
is null and void 
in the deep hours
in which we work
for our true reward.

The Red Dust World says:

Your value is commensurate 
to the degree to which 
you wear out body and soul.

Behind lantern-lit courtyard walls,
in hidden hills of long practice,
a different edict holds sway.

——

© 2026 / Frank Inzan Owen / The Luminous Procession: Poems From Within and Beyond the World of Red Dust

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soundworld: “Glowing in the Depths” / Dialogue of Water / Alio Die & Lorenzo Montana

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