His business

His business                                                                                                     
 
You might feel your pouch is empty –
nothing to give anyone of any value
 
but what others receive from you
is a happenstance beyond your decision or control.
 
Perhaps, your emptiness is the gift; your absence;
your rebuff; perhaps, your need, your cry for help.
 
Who gets what from whom is Baba’s business;
as is what your gift consists of
 
and the precise moment you will forevermore wise up.
Your disappointments, discouragement and gloom –
 
His business, too – as is every detail on your long,
rough journey from ignorance to Knowledge.
 
O child of God, everything
is a gift from the Giver.

 

God versus God

God versus God                                                                                              
 
There’s no battle being waged,
though I feel deeply wounded;
 
the overturned landscape blackened,
littered with dead hopes, lost campaigns.
 
In this hollow I find myself
so small, lost and powerless,
 
knowing not what the reasons are
for fighting anymore
 
nor who is the opposition.
As I wander in search of someone
 
to accept my sword and surrender,
I feel more like a battlefield than a soldier
 
though there is no war being waged,
no opposing armies, only God versus God.
 
O child, even your disillusionment
is a precious gift from the Father.

A cry for love

A cry for love                                                                                       
 
Lovers speak in whispers because
(the story goes), their hearts are nearing a caress
 
and when fully entwined, they will speak no longer,
but merely gaze into each other’s eyes.
 
My words escape to the ceiling
and the back of the room, never to be retrieved.
 
All words are adjectives – meaning lonely;
every poem a cry for love;
 
nothing more plaintive than the human voice.
Love should always be a verb –
 
pronounced with each letter silent.
What use are these words?   Gather my poetry
 
from my slumped posture, my faint smile,
the bewildered look upon my face.
 
O Lord, when will my lips be sealed
with the polished buttons of Your Wisdom?
 
O child of God, merge with your Beloved
and purge this constant ache of separation. 

                                         (from A Jewel in the Dust, 2011)

An eternal halt

An eternal halt                                                                                                 
 
I’m watching the world go by
not from a solid hillock above it
 
but from a cart in the middle of a field
pulled in random circles by a blind mule.
 
I picture everything as standing still,
like that oak tree providing a moving shade
 
as the day progresses but everything is adrift
as if I were on the ocean’s surface,
 
the detritus of my karmic life
floating into my reach and out again
 
as I shift with the current like shade with the sun,
the route of the planet, the cart and the roving mule.
 
O child of God, the aching desire
of humanity is to come to an eternal halt.

 

The sea of dreams

The sea of dreams                                                                                            
 
Take heart, o dreamer! (still deep in your slumber).
The Awakened One is beside your bed, whispering
 
in a language you have long forgotten, entering
your dreams to sow the seeds of clarity.
 
He’ll abandon, at times, His gentleness –
rudely slap your face or rump just to wake you up;
 
shake you roughly; strip you of your coverings; 
draw aside the curtain, open a window
 
upon the cold, uproarious world –
all the while patiently calling your name,    
 
the one He gave you ages ago, before
He set you adrift on the vast sea of dreams.
 
O child of God, your Father would never leave you
to an existence of aimless diaphaneity.

Peter no longer

Peter no longer                                                                                     
 
Jesus asked Peter, “Do you love Me?”,
three times asked him . . . until something broke –
 
Peter no longer
hearing with his ears,
 
nor answering with his mouth,
but with the deep, core silence of perfect ruin.
 
You pose the same question,
silently circumventing our ears,
 
the interior Word, the trumpet call.
Once we learn Your silence,
 
we’ll hear You, at last –
and, contrary to our fears . . .
 
like Peter, soundlessly, emphatically,
with our ruined hearts answer, “Yes, Lord.  Yes!”
 
O child of God, your ears and throat are plugged with clay;
answer Meher with the totality of your spirit.
 
                                        (from A Jewel in the Dust, 2011)

Compassionate Father

Compassionate Father                                                                                     
 
Father of Mercy, You were named
and so I began to follow You –
 
thinking mercy to be what I needed most
and You have obliged me indeed (most mercifully).
 
But these days I’ve turned away from myself
and yet again toward myself to see
 
(by Your mercy) that a capacity for compassion
is what I most lack and thus
 
I beg You these days, Meher Baba,
to fill my emptiness with it –
 
that I might pour it out improvidently
to any and everyone who crosses my path,
 
in Your name and holy essence, I pray,
o merciful, compassionate Father.
 
O child of God, trade in all your cleverness
for one ounce of pure compassion. 

Famous last words

Famous last words                                                                                           
 
In this realm of dust and flesh, we journey
through various stages of grief and death,
 
hope and birth, dread and lust.
In that other realm, Baba says
 
we’ve never left home, gathered around the hearth
as our Father tells the great adventure
 
made up on the spot, His rapt listeners taken
vicariously through the gamut of human experience.
 
There’s no urgency in the fire’s glow;
no deed to accomplish.  No timeline
 
to follow nor lessons to learn;   
not one true thing to relinquish. 
 
We have only to absorb the tale,
cling to our faith in the Storyteller
 
and in our Self, until those famous last words
we hear: ‘ . . . happily ever after’.
 
O child of God, to believe in the Father
is to believe in the fictitiousness of the tale.

Old lover

Old lover                                                                                              
 
Time upon me now like a dog
gnawing the gristle off a bone;
 
body shrinking behind a hesitant smile – 
at the mercy of everything that moves.
 
Undertaker in the mirror, dressing up a corpse.
Which way to part the hair across the skull?
 
Loose dirt under my heels will soon rain
upon my casket like the knocking on a door.
 
Let death and I be well acquainted by then –
an old lover with whom I’ve flirted for years. 
 
Holding death in my arms
and everywhere we move
 
I shall hear her shallow breathing
and Your deep, everlasting silence beneath.
 
O child of God, kiss death before you die
and (the Masters say) taste life eternal.
 
                              (from A Jewel in the Dust, 2011)

 

Dependency

Dependency                                                                                                    
 
At times I am left empty as a well run dry;
a kind of deep nothingness burrowed
 
into the dark below, my Lord
abandoning me (seemingly) to   
 
the last tainted puddles at the bottom;
perhaps, a warning of the hollowness
 
and permeability of the pouch
I keep trying to fill, a dependency
 
that continuously desponds and disappoints me
with its lack of solace, fidelity and satiation. 
 
And perhaps a comparable foretaste
of the non-existence to come,
 
empty of everything –
including fear, thirst and self.
 
O child of God, Meher said, I may give you nothing
and that nothing prove to be everything.

The mystery of the Giver

The mystery of the Giver                                                                                 
 
A quilt, lovingly stitched, these poems 
of mismatched images for each of us
 
to explore and examine at our leisure.
Never coming near the truth
 
but continuously depicting it, offering
new perspectives on the old lessons
 
our ears and brains have grown weary of hearing.
Reworded scripture, sutras, discourses and commentary,
 
a living catalyst to be taken internally,
pondered in the quiet depths of the heart.
 
A gift from our Companion –
a lovingly stitched old quilt
 
I wrap myself in when the nights
grow cold and inhospitable,
 
even yet, quietly stirring and potent;
after all these years, still tinged
 
with the endlessly enchanting
mystery of the Giver.
 
O child of God, these poems are stitched together
by the thread of His merciful indulgence.  

 

Gentle press

Gentle press                                                                                
 
Eternally benevolent – so the Prayer goes –
but, who believes in the benevolence of God?  
 
One shred of evidence –
God wore Your face;
 
placed the Truth into Your hands;
imbued Your form with an unearthly grace;
 
allowed our hearts to settle
under the gentle press of Your thumb.
 
He gave us Your name to repeat –
Compassionate Father . . .
 
Compassionate Father, Compassionate Father . . . .
Perhaps, one day, we’ll believe it.
 
We’ll stretch our necks across the altar,
hold still and let the Master do His work.
 
O child of God, faith is a question of love versus fear.
To Whom will you surrender?
 
                              (from A Jewel in the Dust, 2011)
 

You loved me first

You loved me first                                                                                           
 
How could I have ever cared about myself
if You hadn’t loved me first?
 
Ever lifted my head, showed my face;
caught the acceptance in Your gaze?
 
Ever turned away from the interior drama,
if You hadn’t lured me through the door?
 
How could I have ever had faith in myself
until You picked me up, dusted me off,
 
patted me on the back and bid me to follow
on a new, trustful, itinerant path?
 
O Lord, how could I have ever had the courage
to love You had You not so kindly loved me first?
 
O child of God, love Him until every distinction
of time, space and person dissolves. 

Voyage of the leaky craft

Voyage of the leaky craft                                                                                 
 
It’s never been watertight – my little boat.
I’ve spent a lifetime patching, caulking, plugging.
 
Painted in bright colors it looks splendid
out on the open seas.  People can’t guess
 
the effort involved in keeping it afloat,
though some have noticed
 
the chronic absence of anyone at the helm.
My Lord is urging me to stop bailing –
 
let it flood, let it sink and as captain
dutifully then go down with the ship,
 
settle myself and my leaky little vessel
snugly on the floor of the ocean vast.
 
O child of God, you are a quaky seafarer,
a timid old salt afraid of the water.                          

Love's mantle

Love’s mantle                                                                                       
 
O Meher, what have You done? 
You’ve asked to be loved!
 
Such words are spoken
and mankind breaks out
 
the racks and whips, scaffolds,
crosses, blades and chains!
 
O the effrontery!  The blasphemy
              of such a request
coming from Your silent, human mouth!
 
God is Love – You say;
nothing matters but love for God.
 
Nothing matters but love for Love.   
You’ve come not to teach the inexplicable,
 
but, to bestow – and receive – Love  
unfathomably.
 
O child of God, words can’t pierce Love’s mantle,
but one bold act might aright a wayward world.
 
                              (from A Jewel in the Dust, 2011)

The heart department

The heart department                                                                                       
 
Let us forgive each other, though you should know
there’s nothing to forgive, or more accurately
 
no one to forgive, neither of us very good
in the heart department with our peculiar
 
phobias and mistrust; shame and insularity.
Brought together by fate (torn apart by the same),
 
we learned then and in retrospect, more about karma,
each other and particularly our frightened selves;
 
prompted us each in our own painful ways
to begin unraveling some of the coarser bindings;
 
to make way for fresh ones, places we were reluctant to go;
moving incrementally toward the truth of Meher
 
Who has always stated that we (though not in the way
we once envisioned) are indeed not we but One.
 
O child of God, get wise to yourself, in part
by the kindly study of the others in your life.

My entirety

My entirety                                                                                                      
 
I put together in my youth a jigsaw puzzle
though its image never quite coalesced,
 
having moved the incongruent pieces off
to the precarious, dream-tinged edges,
 
afraid to examine their contradictions.
But in a late quest to get the one true picture,
 
I’ve learned to welcome them back –
the awkward and mismatched,
 
the ironies, improbabilities and jumbles,
no longer trying to fit them snugly into place,
 
no longer taking them as proof of my inadequacy
nor the untrustworthiness of my universe
 
but as evidence of the wondrous inscrutability of creation,
the quirky, impenetrable puzzle of my entirety,
 
the ultimate mystery to which I must attend,
yielding, in obeisance, every alienating objection.
 
O child of God, to move nearer to your Father,
seek contentedness within the enigma.

Foreign to the heart

Foreign to the heart                                                                     
 
The sea batters the stone quay;
salt corrodes the railing. 
 
‘No abiding self,’ whispers the Buddha.  ‘Nothing lasts’.
‘God alone is real,’ You add – softer than a whisper.
 
Surely ignorance and impurity
must also come to an end.
 
Surely death and impermanence
must also come to an end.
 
The Buddha / Avatar – the eternal grace within our flesh.
Lowering another sack of bones into the grave,
 
minds grieve, but our hearts conclude –
we are not the body; we are not the mind.
 
Eternity to the brain is incomprehensible,
but it’s death, inexorable death, that’s foreign to the heart.
 
O child of God, listen to the voice within and move
without contradiction through life, death and beyond.
 
                                        (from A Jewel in the Dust, 2011)

Self-forgetting

Self-forgetting                                                                                                 
 
Shunryu Suzuki would sometimes begin
a discourse by instructing his students to 
 
‘listen carefully to what I say and then forget it’.
Truth is not found by following a set of instructions
 
nor remembering the salient points of a discourse.
Truth is found through an interior interaction
 
with Truth Itself, that eternal part of you already in the know.
Let us remember one thing only – Meher Baba
 
(as He has instructed) the sole abiding existence –
the only memory worth remembering,
 
the only concept invested
with divine intent and meaning.
 
O child of God, remembrance of Meher
unlocks the door of self-forgetting.

 

God in disguise

God in disguise                                                                                                
 
Earlier (quite naturally) a skin-tight boy,
free running but surrounded by threat.
 
Then, a heaven-bound, ephemeral,
angel-versus-devil soul trapped in a body.
 
Later came the lost years of unbelief,
blind flesh and blood –
 
heart and brain sick with dread and lust.
You told me I am God in disguise.
 
I conjured up a higher Self
battling my lower self, laboring to get free.
 
Still later, a window or a witness behind it, kept
somehow invulnerable, immaculate and immune.
 
Today, I envision mySelf as a flaring torch
and, though a mere fragment, a light
 
which creates and sustains the illusion
of my incarnated body, heart, mind and world.
 
O child of God, there are innumerable ways to look
upon your Self, none of them translatable into Reality.

 

Cultivate a thirst

Cultivate a thirst                                                                                    
 
A starving man – so the proverb goes –
          has only one problem.
How many problems have you, O child?
 
Vain and pampered, attired in propriety,
having gotten another bellyful of the world –
 
who would drop a coin into your cup?
Never mind that your poverty is real
          beneath those fashionable robes.
 
It’s not renunciation that’s required –
but acknowledgement and confession.
 
‘Cultivate a thirst,’ Rumi said.
Lovers who burn ache for a quenching.
 
A man in a lifeboat may draw water from the sea,
          slaking his thirst, but dooming himself –
failing to satisfy the deep need within.
 
O child of God, hold out your begging bowl.
Nothing matters but love for God.
 
                              (from A Jewel in the Dust, 2011)

On the road to non-existence

On the road to non-existence                                                                           
 
There’s only God manifesting and the Avatar
come to earth without a single audible word,
 
while inside and out, silently avowing the efficacy
of our remembrance and name-taking.
 
We must content ourselves with the faith 
of that endeavor as He busies Himself
 
unraveling the knots and tangles that bind
and blind us:  at the least, a distraction
 
during a painful procedure; at best,
a key to the realms beneath our awareness,
 
where boundaries blur, bleed and disappear;
where we are destined someday to become the One;
 
where self turns upon itself, rendered ineffectual.
O lovers – you know what I’m talking about,
 
though I can only write down truth
small enough to be put into words.
 
O child of God, on the road to non-existence, there is
neither credit nor blame.  Everything belongs to Him. 

 

Keep watch

Keep watch                                                                                                      
 
While the world slept, Bhau kept
his vigil outside Baba’s room,
 
(as other chosen ones before him) –
attentive, silent and still.
 
As I sit now in one more earnest meditation
(far from Meherazad but not
 
from Meher’s presence)
let me be chosen by fate and grace
 
to be His night watchman.  
At His threshold keep my vigil,
 
settling in to the rhythm of my breath;
the sheerness of my own silence,
 
the silence of my own absence
as I disappear inside it; listen to silence itself
 
until the sudden, sharp command
which will break it and bid me enter.
 
O child of God, sometimes, for this sleeping world,
the best you can do is keep watch.

 

Soon to blur

Soon to blur                                                                      
 
There are all sorts of theories about You.
I don’t know what to believe.
 
So, long ago, I stopped believing –
beyond belief . . . beyond disbelief.
 
Rain falls and I don gear to keep me dry.
Where is opinion and belief in that?
 
Mortar holds the bricks together.
Oil lubricates the mechanisms.
 
The eightfold path – a photo taken from space;
no conjectures there.
 
I take my Beloved for granted.
Didn’t He promise – He is always with me? 
 
O pilgrims, I am a raindrop one day to blur into the Ocean.
My opinion is, my opinion is of little consequence –
 
using what works and discarding what fails,
I find my Beloved closer than the vein in my neck.
 
O child of God, drop that six foot pole,
sink to the bottom to find out where you are.

                               (from A Jewel in the Dust, 2011)