Available for grace

Available for grace                                                                                         
 
I’m not living in the world
but viewing it through a tiny window,
 
uniquely stained, pitted, bleared and smudged.
I’m not the window but through it I follow my life,
 
fatefully attached, a perspective
painfully at odds with my expectations.
 
The trick say the Mystics, is to stop looking
beyond the glass and study the patterns
 
of its surface, revealing the window to be
a narrow, peculiar distortion of a wondrous truth; 
 
turning away then, to at last become
available for grace – to end the separation,
 
the abstraction, the estrangement
from the Truth of Who I really am.
 
O child of God, you will never learn the Truth
but you are destined to become it.

Imampur

Imampur                                                                                               
 
The neglected mosque at Imampur –
I last saw it in a cornfield –
 
built where Arangazeb’s soldiers camped
centuries before, carrying a part of his body
 
to a far corner of the kingdom.
Eruch, Pendu, Baidul and Gustadji,
 
encircled their Lord, loved and obeyed,
struck and spat upon Him,
 
as He endured and directed –
the Pure and Innocent One;
 
His servants balancing shame with duty,
helpless in the workings of the Unfathomable. 
 
O Meher, a part of me is buried in that field,
the part of me that died hearing that story
 
from Eruch’s lips – another nail in the coffin. 
O Beloved, build Your mosque in the grave-dust
          of my heart.
 
O child of God, every command of the Beloved
is pure, holy and of benefit to all mankind.

                               (from A Jewel in the Dust, 2011)

Only God

Only God                                                                                                        
 
The path diverges and where once I stood
fretful, long-peering in each direction,
 
now, more often, I follow the Spirit
(Who listeth where It may), shedding
 
my care as best I might, dedicating
to my Lord each summarily taken fork.
 
The true division (say the Mystics)
is not a choice but an identification –
 
the self-styled sojourner stumbling (at last)
upon the nature of his own non-existence
 
and then doing his (ordained) best
to keep out of the way, witnessing
 
and marveling for brief stretches at a time,
God’s arduous, illusory return to Self.
 
O child of God, what choices are left to you
when there is only God?

Love-pool

Love-pool                                                                                                        
 
Refresh yourself, said Lord Meher,
in that pool of My love within you.
 
Some might call it Original Face
or True Self – that always there depth
 
of pure awareness; that sharing space
of the divine and human.
 
Dropping the veils, shedding the fear,
a dip in that timeless love-pool
 
affords not a witnessing of any sort –
not a perception or concept,
 
metaphor nor imagining but a return –
a sudden immersion into being
 
Who you really are – a communion, Union
(in the interim) with your One true Self.
 
O child of God, His love within
is the living truth of Who you are.