Note: Some poetry from 2021-2022 are unlisted in the Index of Titles.
Suffering is
Suffering is (apparently)
the immutable outcome of God’s Whim,
sustained by His Wish and Will,
while somewhere out of the box
also escaped Union’s distant whisper,
beaded with glittering bits of hope.
Truth can’t be contained within the skull-bone
but the heart’s boundaries are more flexible,
defined by the substances
from which we are constructed –
tree lines, mountain chains, blue skies;
ice formations, rivers; deserts, stars and seas.
O pilgrim, we are already in the same room,
you and I, within arm’s reach of grace.
My poems, you may have noticed,
are becoming increasingly incoherent,
as I become less and less aware
of what it is I’m trying to say.
O child of God, faithfully remind yourself –
the one who loves you is the one who made you.
Light and lofty
The linnet bird touts
its high wire wisdom
without contention, knowing
not enough to be consequential –
a statement of conditions,
not a song of complaint or praise.
Brilliant, this moment of sunlight
in the glen on its warm,
feathered, bird-boned back,
a smidgen of bliss
far as the breeze will carry.
How light and lofty
to be inconsequential,
above all, in God’s corner
singing in, of and for the blue sky
and the wide green world
not one qualified, discordant,
contestable note.
O child of God, trade in your intuitive discernment
for the clean abandonment of not-knowing.
(from Spoken For, 2014)
The first tick of time
An abandoned water mill of some sort.
Trussed like a character in a movie spoof,
I’m just coming to, thirty feet of rope sheathing my body;
a bandanna gagging my mouth; my protruding hands
bound and arranged in prayer.
I’m not asking God for anything anymore.
God has answered my heartfelt prayer already.
He just so rarely ever gives me what I desire
which is never what I lack
but just another loop of the rope.
Swift, deep and final is the river
but even the decision to fall into it
is not mine to make. So
I linger above,
making a poor effort to live without effort,
hoping to forego all hope but only after I acquire
a mighty enough patience to last the rest of eternity.
O child, everything, everything, is and was
ordained by God in the first tick of time.
Love’s vernacular
No wonder You kept silent.
No one
knew what You were talking about!
Mighty lonesome in a world where
so rarely spoken is love's vernacular.
O, how You roared and raged;
shouted; paced Your
cage.
Your silence fell upon deaf ears.
All Your efforts were about love.
Love, we know not the meaning of the word.
And our own silence – we reject out of hand,
deathly afraid of it – the silence of submission;
the silence of non-existence.
O child of God, why speak of Meher?
Silence is the language of love.
(from Spoken For, 2014)
Tinsmith
Mani gave the figure of a tinsmith
hammering a bowl into shape,
his other hand hidden,
supporting the blows from beneath.
With the mandali, You were exacting –
(merciless as the law of karma),
hammering home, time and again,
restraint, discipline and obedience,
Your rebukes tempered afterwards
with love-gestures and divine pardon.
With lovers afar (and yet to come)
You stressed remembrance and devotion,
allowing Illusion to deliver
the shaping blows, presenting Yourself
as the forbearing Companion,
the One Whose love is unconditional.
O child of God, each according to its ripeness;
the depth of its slumber.
That eternal essence
All were formed of the dust,
(states the book of
Ecclesiastes)
and all will return to dust.
Yet there is an unborn part of me
(say the Mystics) which cannot die.
But to refer to that eternal essence
as my soul is like
a flea
claiming ownership of the dog
or a drop representing itself as the ocean.
My small, death-bound self belongs to God
(Who presides forever) but neither God
nor His soul-drop essence belongs to me.
O child, get further and further away
(said Meher) from
I, me, my and mine.
The final appointment
In this aftertaste of satiation
(the whole world having lost its savor),
His one drop of nectar still whets my thirst.
And though I am well on my way, I shall not,
save by some unforeseen intervention of grace,
make heaven any lifetime soon.
Instead, I shall be dropped again somewhere
within the grappling human milieu, naked and lost,
ignorant, seemingly alone, to take up the task once more
of finding my Lord and my way back home.
O child of God, have faith in the final appointment,
tenuous and afar, which will one day bring you peace.
