To love

To love   

To love God in the most practical way,

Meher Baba said, is to love our fellow beings.

I nod always, mumble under my breath –

yes, because everyone is You.

But, one day, You whispered in return –

because, lover, ... to love ... is to love God.

The sculptor grinds the chisel to a perfect bevel.

The sawyer sharpens the blade’s teeth.

The cutting torch, the welder adjusts

to the precise admixture 

of acetylene and oxygen.

Now the flame can cut steel.

It is the purity of love that shapes and sharpens

the chisel, the blade, the flame,  

allowing for the cutting through,

the paring down, the severing.

O child of God, to love is to teach

the heart how.  To love is to love God.

                        (Unpublished)

The hunger

 The hunger                                                                                              

After the poem, comes an emptiness,

a missed opportunity, a haunting plea --

what have you done for me lately?

Emptiness, the Source of poetry;

the ache for God

the empowerment of every word.

Consult your dictionary – sources

and derivatives, metaphors and similes,

colloquialisms and dialects –

all spellbinding and apropos.  I can’t keep writing 

forever and what would it mean?

Redemption is not contained in words.

This poem – another brief

and partial realization –

to write it down is to lose it –

unreal when put into rhyme

but, that’s the job I’ve been given

to save my soul.  And this seems like the end

of the poem, so what to do now?

The hunger’s still there.

O child of God, be grateful for that hunger.

It will one day lead you to God.

 

                       

Early post-advent

Early post-advent                                                                         

I pray for this poem (which I intend) to be a prayer

trampled in a field of fresh snow,

making sense only when viewed from a great height;

not merely a shadow of life and death

but the difference between

solace and grief, hope and despair.

I pray for your poems, too, o lovers of God;

your prayers, too – ink, oils or clay,

eye, throat, shoulders, thighs. 

May you reach that purity

of breath, blood and bone  

beyond sound and form;

may your blood run its tireless course

from the moon’s blotched surface 

to the rich earth beneath the snow

and your bones, your bones -- may they turn up

in the spring in green fields,

bleached evidence of fallen soldiers

in these mad and turbulent,

early post-advent years of Meher Baba.

O child of God, say your poetry and your prayers

with precisely the same fervor and devotion.