Love for God

Love for God                                                                                                   
 
The radio plays another top forty tune
featuring the words faithful, true, forever, –
 
our romantic, love-obsessed culture,
celebrating the brief (however time is measured)
 
thrill and heartache of one human being’s
passionate attachment to another.  
 
But the love for God that Meher exhorts us to realize
is a consummate non-attachment,
 
the cultivation of an interior relationship
liberating the lover from all the extraneous others.
 
This last duplicity ultimately coming to naught
as our separative existence is absorbed into the One.
 
O child of God, abandon a world in which
the word love has lost any real meaning.

Mighty opus

Mighty opus                                                                                         
 
An eternity of silence, then God sang …
suns and planets, stars and moons;
 
sang rivers and mountains, wind and rain.
Sang the garden, Adam and Eve.   Sang Iblis;
 
let loose a multitude of angels to flood this world –
all from the nothingness lodged in His throat –
 
light and dark, cold and heat, large and small,
inner and outer – reverberating, dividing,
 
spinning and expanding --
on the sole Sound of His Holy Voice.
 
When God entered again this Song-existence
He nestled into Your cozy body and kept silent;
 
let His love do the singing inside of You.
What note could He add to His perfect composition?
 
Only silence – a strategic pause
in the mighty opus of creation.
 
O child of God, the Beloved in this advent kept silent.

God listened to His own perfection and added nothing. 

                                  (from A Jewel in the Dust, 2011)

Best keep mum

Best keep mum                                                                                                
 
I speak less these days, ever since
I heard myself from across the room,
 
not so much the import but the timbre,
as if my voice were descending from the rafters
 
or arrowing across the distance
to pin someone against the wall. 
 
Ashamed that that adamancy should come   
from me and ever be heard by anyone. 
 
I don’t speak with my Lord’s kindliness
and until I do, I best keep mum.
 
One day, I pray that whenever I speak,
my voice will come from under His sandal heel.
 
O child of God, pray for the sort of love
that will make you abandon words entirely.

The flame of a torch

The flame of a torch                                                                                        
 
My Lord is leading me by example
and persuasion inexorably into silence.
 
What could I ever pray aloud
that God doesn’t already know?
 
What could my false self ever tell that isn’t a lie?
What advice could I give not born of ignorance?
 
What opinions could I offer others
that aren’t manipulative and self-centered?
 
Doesn’t silence speak volumes anyway?
Is not a smile and embrace,
 
a hand on the shoulder,
a deep look into the eyes
 
more communicative than the spoken word?
And what words ever directly
 
come from the inarticulate heart     
rather than the ever calculating head?     
 
O child of God, trade in your words for the ability
to whisper and crackle like the flame of a torch.