Pyramid Poetry (June 1999)

Reprinted with permission from The New Mexico T’ai Chi Chih News, October, 1998.

I am glad to see Pyramid Poetry spreading so rapidly. We were recently told of group Pyramid Poetry sessions in New England! I don’t know if this is because of the instruction in my book, Climb the Joyous Mountain, or because teachers have read Pyramid Poems in the Vital Force and the T’ai Chi Chih News. Whatever, maybe it’s a joyous force spreading rapidly. Making Pyramid Poems is like eating peanuts; you always feel like doing one more, hoping and believing it will be better than the last. And it usually will!

I speak Japanese and know how much easier it is to write Haiku in that language than to do so in English. That is what started me, years ago, writing poems in my own form — one syllable, two, three, four, three, two, one, with the punch in the last syllable, where possible.

I have noticed that people get quite philosophical when writing Pyramid poems, maybe because T’ai Chi Chih people seem to go beneath the surface a little more than most people. A good time to write the poems is after doing T’ai Chi Chih or Seijaku. Creativity and Intuition seem greatly heightened at such time.

It is my hope that, one day, Good Karma may decide to publish a pamphlet with some of the poems in it. Don’t forget, you can always write one more.

– Justin

* * *

Minds,
be like
tethered kites
able both to soar
through the air
and come
down

– Mark Maloney

Reprinted with permission from The New Mexico T’ai Chi Chih News, May, 1999

Sun
filters
through cherry
blossoms, lighting
the way home
to the
Heart

– Ed Altman

I
find it
amusing
that I teach best
what I need
to learn
most

– Sharon Sirkis