Light and lofty

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.

Love's vernacular

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.

Tinsmith

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. 

 

Where the day will take us

Where the day will take us                                                                         

Harder each year, becomes the routine –

folding and unfolding myself;

reach, stretch, bend and arch. Harder still

to flex that not-the-body pertaining to me –

to keep it vital, generous and receptive.

Jesus said, become as a little child –

when I went about where the day would take me,

shedding a life in time of hierarchical impositions;

exploring the outposts and wild purlieus

nameless and unruly; heroic and detached.

It’s not that unmarked tablet (lost on the way to school)

we must recover but, our flexibility, our susceptibility,

slipping out of our tendencies,

our utterly crushing contexts,

young and vigorous, lithesome and nimble,

adventuresome deep in our bones,

as we go about exploring the vast,

Godly paths of where the day will take us.

O child of God, are your own arrangements

superior to your Father’s intentions?