AWARENESS

AWARENESS

A Pastoral

Harvesting corn with my hands,

I feel their kernels, ripe with starch

while their stalks cry under

my hands and the green

sheaths feel rough to the touch,

while we bend the hefty corn-ears

and tear off the thin silk-hair from

their husks. Our bodies in concord,

we move along the aisles

in the heat of the sealed field.

Aware of my heartbeat under

my sun-shielding skin, I hear

an inner voice, like a diary,

steering my writing hand while

I glaze the corn field into

the mirror of myself and speak

to you, my host, conscious

of our confluent breaths.

This poem from my book, A Woman By A Well, describes my feeling that our awareness

has its source in the consciousness of our bodies in action, reaping corn in a field of corn.

I feel that awareness is born out of being conscious of our bodies "in concord" as we gather

food together. I, then, write about the analogy of corn gathering with poetry writing as

reaching out to my reader once the poem is written. According to the latest neuroscientific

research, awareness is defined as the integrated result of highly detailed information

by our brain. The difference between human and animal awareness is that we, humans,

are aware of our awareness whereas animals are not. Animals are simply aware but their

awareness also depends on an intricate imbrication of information just as it does with us, humans.