The letters tumble off the page,
which becomes a vacuum,
and terror like a beast uncaged
prowls the white & glaring room.
Common meanings, held in place
by shared perception, disintegrate
when someone dies, and so the space
that’s left becomes an anarchic state.
My mother’s house contained her world,
all that she was therein exprest –
emptied of what she once had valued
it’s as if her life’s disperst,
her character obliterated –
surviving now in memory
alone, until we too, as fated,
leave the living family.
As each picture is removed
the dustlines left around the walls
leave only the ghost of love
echoing a deserted hall.
What is it lives within a space
and slowly dies as memory fades?
Where is the energy that can outpace
these implacable engulfing shades?
In music and spirituality
alike, it is the intensity
of creative clarity
that defines longevity.
Truly there is a narrow path
that leads across the formless waste
between the two nights till by the faith
we see the dawning of the day.
Meanings have to fall apart,
words collapse in anarchy,
for this is how we learn by heart
and come to understand the key.
The fusion of brain and heart and will
in service of a greater good
produces a result that still
cannot be linearly understood.
Logic is for human goals.
They who seek to penetrate
the riddle some call ‘god’ are souls
who learn how intimately Fate
appears a dominant force; yet each
by this is given a chance for learning
how to be open to what they search
appearing another way of seeing;
one in which their integration
allows for synchronicity
to demonstrate, in their creation,
how each must own complicity.
Thus this seems to be life’s riddle:
the skill with which we dance our jig
depends on how we hear the fiddle
that the mæstro plays. And that’s the gig!
Studying this phenomenon
the result with which I’m faced
is that coherence alone brings clarity
and clarity alone brings grace.
And grace alone can fly us throu
the dark night of disintegration
when meanings fail, and what seemed true
mocks all hope of a salvation.
This was my mother’s final journey.
We all who witnest her despair
knew the pain of her latter agony
and could only watch with prayer;
yet in that harsh ordeal by fire
in which all hope is burnt to dust
she never lost her heart’s desire
to see God’s love repay her trust.
So may she now be fathered and found,
at home, at rest, at peace; her pain
released, rewarded with the crown
which they who love till death can claim.
We can’t evade the ferryman
who carries all beyond his stream
yet if we travel light we can
o’erfly the Styx as in a dream.
Thus each can clearly look at death
yet not by death be seen. For this
we have to trust the power of breath
to be exactly present: Now is
Always – Eternity is Now.
This is what each sage has taught
to set the spirit free, and how
all may escape when caught.
All these enigmas crowd the rooms
my mother once inhabited;
vacant now, her power perfumes
the lives of all who visited.
Tho her house be empty, bared
for other occupants, she lives
behind my eyes, and I’m prepared
to keep her idealism alive.
A fond farewell and then we part.
All that was familiar gone,
yet each of us within our heart
carrying memories all life long.
