Zero-sum
game
I’m
a born again Christian –
born
again and again and again,
body
to body and moment to moment
so
that no one is ever at home.
Brahma,
Vishnu, Shiva have hold of me
as
my essence flits and flickers
through
the momentary transitions
of
creation, preservation and destruction.
My
body is subject to the physical laws
but
(per Meher) I’m ever as young
as
the moment at hand and ever beyond
the
reach of Life-in-Illusion’s zero-sum game.
O
child of God, you are not the body nor the mind,
not this or that. You
are (per Meher) Truth eternal.
Little
white lies
This
cold, familiar world seems so hardy,
but
don’t you believe it –
it’s
but a fragile, shimmering dream,
liable
to disappear at any moment.
To
grasp the gist of this poem,
read
between the lines
after
the words have petered out.
Their
white bleakness is the message,
the
emptiness that frames our lives,
the
comfort we take in the familiar
as
we chatter casually among ourselves
from
our various foxholes.
Take
care, o child, take care. Let not the world
entangle you in the
web of its little white lies.
My
childhood summers
Another
day marked off on the calendar
as
if it really does have a name and number,
my
life counting down now
in
months and days rather than years.
Death
has always been an abstract to me,
an
absence rather than a occurrence
and
these days I summon up
my
childhood summers
when
time was measured
only
in daylight or darkness
and
I reconstruct as best I can
that
guileless childhood abandon,
moving
untouched through time,
unobservant
of its inexorable passing.
O
child of God, Brian Darnell shall one day die.
You, on the other
hand, will live forever.
Bring
forth the ardor
I
recite a love poem for my Lord –
more
of a plea for love
than
a profession of it –
a
love I hope to one day possess.
He
knows of it already,
before
this thick-tongued,
faint-of-heart
suitor can deliver it.
The
words I choose – in fact, any words at all –
are
not an agency of truth
but
of a wish and a hope and a pledge
to
allow Him as best I might
to
enter every hidden recess of my being,
to
bring forth the ardor dormant there, the depths
of
which I have never had the courage to plumb.
O
child of God, the love you crave (per Meher)
comes from within,
awaiting only its retrieval.
(painting by Mark Hodges)
