God instead

God instead                                                                                          

I don’t know the particulars

but I’m going to have to leave

this world one day, the only one

I ever remember knowing;

leave behind everyone

and everything I hold dear

because the sea is (after all) cardboard

and the moon is made of paper.

I’m not talking about death’s overtaking

but as a clear-eyed, deep-breath resolution.

Because if I and Love are eternal,

my affections and their objects (like myself)

are but pale, irresolvable reflections.

And to reach beyond the facade I must one day

unhand voluntarily their brief, illusory

solace and choose God instead.

O child of God, repeating the mystic promises,

you hover constantly near the edge of the abyss.

Faith in love

Faith in love                                                 

There’s a movie showing out there.

I’m watching it and at the same time

I’m in the middle of it.  That’s the great mystery

words fail to describe; thoughts encounter a solid wall.

Words fail, but one word refuses to go away –

love – which Meher Baba uses to cover all bases

and list under one category the inexplicable.

Love which we know well enough

to desire its taste but not well enough

to drown in, its depths to reveal.

So we are left with faith instead, through it

to learn a new blind, deaf, dumb way to live,

nearer to love, nearer to truth, rooted in the ancient way,

trusting everything we are to His will and whim.

O child of God, faith in Meher Baba

is faith in love.

That promised, quenched peace

That promised, quenched peace                                                                           

Once my heart lush green, fresh from sky and earth,

time soon turned a fiery red, flush with hot-blooded desire.

A constant thwarting chilled its ardor, withered it yellow, 

a timid fellow burrowing deeper into my chest

where bound in icy veins, it turned a dark bruised blue.

Today before its inevitable ceasing altogether

it beats a weathered gray, slow in its movements,

shedding its tears and quietly turning hoary white.

Perhaps true love will some lifetime hence,

as faith requires, fetch it up clear and colorless,

as incorporeal as the mystery that inhabits it

since first it arose beating, lonely and dim

to endure the mortal assaults of ignorance and illusion;

plucked from its checkered, colored path to rest

eternally onward in that promised,

quenched peace beyond its fleshly ken.

O child of God, what florid poetry you use

to recount the brutal facts and pray for redemption.

Return to Canaan

Return to Canaan                                                                                 

A pillar of fire and cloud guided Moses

and the chosen ones day and night

on their tramp through the desert;

their return to Canaan.  Sent by God

to keep them from getting lost,

discouraged and distracted.

Meher Baba has replaced the fire and cloud

in our nowadays desert with His own image

and the sound of His name,

to keep us from getting lost,

discouraged and distracted.

Guiding His lovers – those newly gathered,

ragtag expatriates – in a night-and-day beeline

to our predestined, long-promised rendezvous.

O child of God, forty years is but a half-step

in the journey that lies afore and aft.