The Heart

The heart doesn't just beat inside the chest

It's not just a muscle pumping blood

  that sends oxygen to our cells so we don't keel over and die

It's not just creepy kissing teddy bears

  that you wish you had never seen at the drugstore

And it's certainly not just two people feeling desperate

  and sleeping with each other, enjoying it,

 and then thinking that they're "meant to be."

The heart beats in time with the ocean,

with the thunder and rain

It beats for the young man, the old man, the man yet to be

It beats in the desert, under smoldering sunny skies

It beats in the jungle, in the heavy heat and hunger for air

It beats on the mountaintop,

  where winds whistle and the world feel so much bigger

It beats under a starless sky, on a moonless moor, in mellow meadows.

It's rhythm can be felt in the shadows,

  in the secrets, in the sorrows and the screaming

It can be felt in open air, cotton clouds, in the laughter,

  in the light and the living

It can felt in all season, through the earth, the air, the land and the sea.

The rhythm beats inside the quivering body of a tiny humming bird,

  inside a slow, sleepy elephant,

Inside a silent, patient, pouncing tiger,

  inside jackdaws and beavers and lemurs and mooses

  and mouses and fishes and horses and myriads of

Bouncing, pouncing, trouncing, flouncing, beautiful creatures

All over the earth.

The heart beats inside old, twisted, rusty junk that people throw away

  without a second thought.

The heart beats on rooftops and skyscrapers,

 on lawns and sidewalks and winding trails through

 endless miles of trees and tangles of roots and pebbles and

 in every single, elusive sparrow singing beyond your sight.

I hear it in my sisters' laughter

I feel it in my mother's hugs

I taste in the morning sunshine

I smell in the spring when there is color in the world again

I see in the sunsets that never cease to amaze.

My heart beats with the chatter of my imagination,

  with the dawn and the dusk,

 when I spontaneously decide to go dancing in the rain

When I throw back my head and sing with the stars and feel so very small.