In relationships –
Anything you do
Unto another –
Can – in turn –
Be done to you
06.17.95
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Copyright by Minh Tan on listed dated of completion
and published in Perspectives, ISBN 0-9686250-0-2.
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Notes to this poem…
Looking back through my poems in chronological order, I wish I remembered how I was feeling on June 17 1995 when I started and finished this little recent series of poems from One Stanza Poem 035 to this one, all of which were quite revelational to me.
This poem is simple, but it’s true. It just states my belief of karma specifically to relationships, although not in the karmic sense of things whereby it might happen to you. Rather, I mean to state the concept as whatever you do in relationships can deliberately be done to you in return, whether or not you had intentionally done it. You have to be responsible for your actions, that’s all.
Whether or not you believe in the philosophy suggested here is up to you. All I’ll say is that in my life, karma seems to work well and strong. I can give you all kinds of instances when big and odd and tiny things happen that essentially restored the karmic balance after something had happened to me or I had done something to somebody, for good or bad. With that sort of thing happening in my life constantly, who needs religion to be good? I fear the consequences of my karma far more than any deity anybody’s ever tried me I should be trying to fear or accept as my overseer or whatever. The cosmic entropy of my universe isn’t completely entropic, but rather have good taste for a sense of justice.
As a final note, this poem was not written out of any incident in my life at or near to the time. Some things were just floating in my head and collided to create this new thought. It was one of those kinds of poems, but those are the kinds I most love to write because it’s from pure inspiration.
The O-series of poems are one stanza poems composed before I got onto writing haiku and tanka, and short poetry while in action or traveling by select means like plane or ferry. These poems are 3-9 lines long with at least one rhyming couplet, and not of the short forms just mentioned. For the sake of elegance, I just called the collection One.
Minh Tan's Old Poetry 
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