Call His name
The darning of a sweater,
a pulling on the oars;
the sawing of a casket plank,
a bell’s tolling;
a calling bird in the green wood;
its flap of wings across the sky;
the knocking on a door,
the chimes of a clock,
singsong, singsong, say His name –
Meher Meher Meher Meher . . .
sewing us up; sewing ourselves
to His silence, with each stitch
more inseverable, each stroke, toll,
call and flap; each knock
upon heaven’s solid, heavy door,
calling to the One inside.
O child of God, call His name
until it sings in your veins.
The One Who never leaves
O pilgrim! We come into this world,
grow up, grow old and depart, or so it seems.
This existence into which we are tossed
stays and we move on, or so it seems.
But a few have come over the ages to say:
I am the One Who never leaves!
They come to say: I alone exist
and you and I are not we but One.
O pilgrim, we are the One Who never leaves!
Pilgrim being a misnomer,
we are the One Who never goes anywhere –
the still river the bridge flows through.
Ceaselessly around Us, illusion arises,
flourishes, then is destroyed –
again and again – ephemeral, temporal,
illusory, flowing ceaselessly
around the One eternal existence
which is Who we are – the One Who never leaves.
O child of God, maya is the apparently erroneous
notion that you are born, you live and you die.
Our guaranteed return
The world’s a nothingness and God’s a myth,
wrote the poet Francis. You have
shown me this.
You have shown me this . . .
setting Francis to roam the nothingness,
singing ‘neath that boundless starry dome,
singing words awaiting, awaiting
the flood of the Word of words.
Francis lost, a mote in a dust whorl,
left behind by the Reality to Which the myth alludes.
A billion years (by his estimation) to get his heart in tune,
ready to sing the Real song. O
Francis,
I am with you. I am with you on the
dusty plain,
‘neath the spangled bell jar dome, singing,
singing and waiting for the Lord to take us home.
O child of God, let the longing pierce your songs
with the sweetness of our guaranteed return.
The journey that never
was
A kind of exile you are now
unable to walk the same aisles,
sit in the same pew as others,
hands folded quietly in your lap.
Your eccentricity showing through
the bursting seams of your threadbare coat.
You’ve dropped the things you’re supposed to
care about; your interests few. Old
friends
(who never really were) have drifted away
while you to some measure have left behind
your loved ones, for their sake,
to go searching for the eternal connection.
You follow the flow of an uncharted river
as you push toward oblivion
and wonder when this latest rug
will be pulled out from under your feet.
It doesn’t really matter anymore.
It’s all a part of the journey that never was.
O child of God, should it be surprising
that the new life is nothing like the old?
(drawing by Rich Panico)
