Perhaps not all “innocence” is “lost”…  On the other hand, I may have changed my mind about some of these reflections. Or is it impossible for ME to read this poem as if for the first time?

INNOCENCE
Betty Luceigh (c. 2005)

Innocence is a state of receptivity
through an eye detached from memory,
observing for the first time,
without inventive assumptions
or stale remembrances,
seeing what is so we can be with what is,
each time as if the first experience of attention.

Innocence is seeing the sun rise as if it will only do so this morn,
seeing the moon set as if it will never return,
seeing a longtime friend across the dinner table as if you just met,
seeing my own emergence in its natural purity.

Perhaps innocence can be temporarily lost
like a car key when you are in a hurry to leave–
you know it is there somewhere
but plain sight is blinded by your frenzy.
It may be that way with innocence;
we don’t use the clarity of seeing in the present
because we’ve traveled a neuron to a past
where false urgency of survival clouds a current truth.

Innocence is not a state to be acted upon,
decisions made, directives offered, threats evaluated.
To do so would be foolhardy ignorance,
for innocence is not a motion, not an emotion.
Innocence is a chosen state of presence
emanating from the love-fields of the heart
that we might observe from within our own
the Divine essence within others.