Captured

Captured                                                                                               
 
A moth captured in the lantern’s glass,
frantically hurtling to and fro,
 
until its wings turn to flame
and become light itself.
 
Entering Your Samadhi, I found a vastness
beyond the boundaries of any existence;
 
the clouded dome turned
into a night sky full of stars
 
and beyond Your fiery sepulcher,
a labyrinth of paths led into a dark woods.
 
I’m captured, O Beloved, in Your Samadhi,
moving frantically here and there.
 
There’s only one door in . . . and no way out.
When I exhaust myself, I’ll die at Your feet.
 
O child of God, let your wings turn to ash
then see what Truth shall arise.

                            (from A Jewel in the Dust, 2011)

Ageless and momentary

Ageless and momentary                                                                                   
 
I view now the stilled body in the coffin
I never was, curious as to where
 
my mind is wandering after the great parting.
The body I’ve mistaken myself for all my life;
 
the body everyone has tagged me to be.
And once free from it, (my mind
 
taken up with other matters), I find
there’s no visceral point at which
 
to pin down exactly just who I am
and might have been all those years –
 
surely not my adopted,
(only apparently) inhabited body
 
nor my spontaneous and fluid, chameleonic mind;
not my self-imagined, individualized soul
 
but somehow, somehow, (I am told)
a free-floating, ethereal, eternal ephemeral –
 
an unimaginable, conscious window pushed open
upon the ageless and momentary process of existence.
 
O child of God, devoid of body, mind and soul,
who is it then who requires liberation?

 

The one true flame

The one true flame                                                                                 
 
It might be described as a flame (perhaps) –
an oil lamp turned way down low
 
hanging at the doorsteps of the heart’s shop
dimly illuminating the arches within.
 
Or, perhaps, a tension (rather than heat
and light) not quite physical, which might
 
at any prompting become a loose flutter
and, perhaps, take flight.  Or, a slight tremor
 
below the range of sound, yet ever
on the verge of the melodic. 
 
An enigmatic presence to pay heed to,
to shelter with cupped heart-hands;
 
to forsake entirely the whole of the world
for this tiny, intimate flame-tension-tremor
 
within a body no longer mine, a mind no longer me,
an existence I have ceased attempting to grasp.
 
O child of God, look upon your every fellow creature
as yet another bearer of the one true flame.

The Truth of Meher

The Truth of Meher                                                                              
 
You said, ‘Don’t let go the hand of Truth.’
You are the only Truth I know
 
with a hand attached to It.
I’ve heard and read a multitude of words
 
claimed by scholars to be True,
but with You, Truth shook Itself loose         
 
from the page; walked around;
expressed Itself in Your cheeks, jowls and brow;
 
shone from Your eyes; sang in Your throat –
until Your throat became Your hands,
 
grasping the outstretched hands
of your Truth-starved lovers. 
 
O Meher, I won’t let go. 
You’re the only Truth I hold.
 
O child of God, if you really knew the Truth of Meher,
you would live It . . .  mind, body and soul.

                                   (from A Jewel in the Dust, 2011)