Making a living

Making a living                                                                              
 
I was once a working man, hands strong,
calloused from the rub of making a living.
 
Also grown thick, toughened up –
my heartskin within its cavern and cage,
 
leathery from the world’s rough handling.
My hands today are soft as a baby’s –
 
clean, idle, while my heart is daily
more tender and sore as it emerges
 
from its enclosure, more willing
to take in the ache of flesh and world
 
as it suits my Lord’s will – a blessed penance
and the required estrangement from self
 
on the long journey through and beyond
this clamorous Illusion to that hidden Sanctuary.
 
O child of God, retire from the world
and open your heart to the eternal.

God-given

God-given                                                                                         

The mind fades – I’m learning to put forth
the heart, a small warmth, a candle
 
flickering in the dark of my cell,
not flame enough yet to burn away the dross
 
but a relief to my chronic solitude –
a glow sufficiently humble to draw my Beloved.
 
He absorbs our tormenting sins to the exact extent
we open our wounds to His mercy,
 
His benevolence annulling
our every clinging indulgence,
 
allowing expansiveness to bloom –
an assured and expressive love setting up a house
 
of which we seem inherently unfamiliar,
a peace from which we’ve been too long estranged
 
but which is apparently our Self, our essence –
the seeds, pith and components of our true being.
 
O child of God, the flame within is the dhuni
burning away all your imagined deficiencies.

 

Suspect death

Suspect death                                                                              
 
When you begin to suspect death
is not an exit but a roundabout
 
and you feel your ribs as bars of a cage;
your loneliness ghostly – chronic and eternal,
 
then the God within you begins
to elbow His way to the surface. 
 
You think it’s a quest but it’s a dismantling.
It’s not life eternal you’re after, but permanent death,
 
finding out later it must come to you
(like the death of an aged body) of its own accord,
 
a predestined step toward resurrection;
the last one-and-only-true death to undergo
 
before (by Meher’s promise) you cease to exist entirely
within His everlasting Oneness.
 
O child of God, let your imagination soar
but only to aid you in the matters at hand.

Through the moves

Through the moves                                                                            
 
You’ve chosen this dance for us,
out on a darkened floor where
 
no one knows my body language
but the One Who brought me here,
 
the One I so desperately want to leave with.
You’ve become a long shot.
 
In our clinched intimacy, I readily confess
my perplexity, my fear, my faith.
 
If there was any possible escape
I might try to slip through an exit
 
but You, in Your mercy, have sealed my fate
as we face the music in a loose embrace –
 
Your features lost in the shadows;
I, inelegantly, trying to follow Your lead.
 
O child of God, hold tightly to your Beloved
as He takes you through the moves. 

Love and dust

Love and dust                                                                               
 
Such a lost cause, I must believe
You’ve taken me up, perhaps,
 
for another lifetime’s sake,
though I still entertain romantic thoughts,
 
even at this late date, of my flesh becoming
love and dust at Your feet.
 
A bloodless scarecrow, foreign in the field,
where a spine should be – a rough-timbered rood,
 
a weathered, rummaged exterior,
heart of straw, whose dream is to become
 
a torch visible for miles but unseen now
where I am braced in the autumn chill,
 
late-night, lonely vale; my essence
then wind-scattered, such as it is,
 
blending ash with dust, to cling lightly
to Your striding, clean, golden-threaded hem
 
as You make Your way home
from the fields of Your labor.
 
O child of God, may your romanticism
lure you into the arms of His Reality.

The shard of a mirror

The shard of a mirror                                                                         
 
It’s not God you’ve been chasing all these years
but, one by one, your own hallucinatory thoughts.
 
Time to quit the path where you stand.
Not another step.  Enter a cave, a closet,
 
a monk’s cell and find there an intimacy
you never knew out on that lost highway.
 
Time to cold-shoulder the multifarious
and concentrate upon the One; 
 
eschew the flitting and elusive for the changeless eternal;
spaciousness for the cramped quarters of just God and you.
 
A thick darkness is settling in now, so you might see
only God shining – not at the far end of a tunnel
 
but in the shard of a mirror 
tacked to the back wall of your cell.
 
O child of God, so many years go by before
the significance of His everyday words begin to emerge.

(painting by Mark Hodges)

Moondust

Moondust                                                                                          
 
I can make out the lunar mares –
the Sea of Tranquility just there, composed
 
of moondust rather than saltwater,
human bootprints now in the blue-gray tint
 
of its basaltic soil.  There’s a sea also inside of me 
made of the bitter, accumulated dust
 
of my past lives, which Maya may arouse
at any possible moment into a blinding storm,
 
dust borne on its almost irresistible winds –
the cause of my straying off course
 
from His (and even my own) will.
But with faith and His grace
 
of patience and insight, I might instead
let it gather and lie at the bottom of my heart,
 
tranquilly undisturbed, enough for my bootprints
to spell out legibly my Redeemer’s holy name.
 
O child of God, seek the mighty hand
of the One who hung the moon.

This field of dust

This field of dust                                                                                
 
People are solidifying their positions.
I’m being broken up like ground for planting.
 
The smell of seeds on the breeze, rust, roots
and soil; the song of yin and yang, gee and haw. 
 
I’m no longer able to live with myself
yet here I am still breathing.  Such is my dilemma.
 
Others are getting brittle over their little plots of truth,
taking up arms to preserve their sovereignty.
 
I’m walking the narrow lane between two furrows,
heading for that shade tree at the far end of the fence line.
 
We are all less than the wind that buffets us,
blusters and dies, shifts to a new tack.
 
We’ve no abiding substance.  There is no me
to live with or die for, no life to surrender to my Lord;
 
nothing in this whirlwind to hold onto,
nothing to fight over in this field of dust. 
 
O child of God, to enter the new life, first
note the improbability of your own existence.