2008/10/29

Arc

In poems I record my passage across the trackless wastes
of night, where I receive such startling clarity –

as if the milky way were opened to invite me in,
and I, a child, enter Aladdin’s cave

where I am shown great wonders of the spirit that will not fit
into the two-dimensional suitcases

which language offers to convey experiences to others.
Noone knows I'm here or where I've been.

I feel a kinship with the madder Hebrew prophets, who dwelt
in deserts and lived on locusts and wild honey –

fierce and uncouth as they were, their inner ear was ever open.
So it was with early English hermits,

whose springside cells invited angels by their energy.
I do not know what all of this is ‘for’,

and yet I feel it charging some kind of cosmic battery.
In the silence of each vivid night

my voice projects across the void of time in ways it never
could with ideas tethered to modern age.

It's as if my task’s to walk the arc that travels outward
from our human certainties towards

divine uncertainty, where pregnant gods suspend the rules
and magic’s in the air. This glorious dance of

spirits, tho optically invisible, is joined by sacred
attunement to the subtle vibrations of light and joy.

It is a plane above the sphere of compromise that’s ruled
by non-materialistic reason, where

the laws of love create those self-refreshing structures which
in-form justice and truth and inner knowledge.


How easy in the night to know: how hard by day to do –
where perfect lines of thought must bend round others.

Voice is to audience, as language /image is to common sense:
melody to listeners, as genre to social tribe.

My task appears to be to smuggle out the sense I have of this
ultra-real world of spirit truth,

that it may flow like water where it will, and nourish those
who do not dam its purpose or dynamic.

The spirit speaks to all, but those with ears to hear are rare –
for most prefer to hear from human guides.

And so I make my mark on stones and trees with ill-formed tools,
not knowing whether what they signify

to me will have the same (or any) meaning to another.
Matching means to ends is a lifetime’s task.

How easy it would be if I were not constrained to bring
something of these precious gifts away with me.

In giving what I can to whom I may, I form another
link in the chain that stretches back to godhead.

2008/10/28

Autumn Gold

 
I stood in autumn fields
where great warm thighs of hills
rose between wooded cwms
like earth-bound venuses
inviting the dying sun god,

For once my heart and soul
were joined in perfect accord
by an intense silence,
as a growing hedgerow
yearns in the sunlight.

The breath of foraging dogs
the loudest sound, apart from a
wren singing its heart out
on a distant ash.
From whom this gift of peace?

Whom do I praise and thank
for such extravagant beauty?
Can this truly be
the product of a random
feckless evolution?

Or have we failed to see
the nature of a spirit
unifying the sleepy
butterfly, the ancient
oak, the ocean’s power,
the milky way, and us?
 
Thank you – Being – with all
my heart for the unique
privilege of being
present at this inter-
section of time and space,
 

2008/10/07

What is my place?

“Your place is not to go around doing things from your own initiative: it is to be in your place. There I can use you, nowherelse.”