Bernie Gourley is a writer living in Bangalore, India. His poetry collection, Poems of the Introverted Yogi is now available on Amazon.
He teaches yoga, with a specialization in pranayama, and holds a RYT500 certification. For most of his adult life, he practiced martial arts, including: Kobudo, Muay Thai, Kalaripayattu, and Taiji.
He is a world traveler, having visited more than 40 countries around the globe.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd:
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st;
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
One foot in the river.
One foot on the shore.
Both feet sunk in the mud.
The fisherman casts his net
with perfect flick and spin,
muck extruding between toes.
The sling is the one quick
part of the movement:
quick, but unrushed.
The net is hauled back,
slowly and methodically,
pressing out excess water
while offering no escape route.
How many casts per day?
As many as are necessary.
There are other fishers,
out on languidly rocking boats,
casting out in the river.
And in rivers everywhere:
in the Mekong,
the Amazon,
the Euphrates,
and the Mississippi Delta.
Everywhere, they are casting.
