The interior
Put away the road map.
You’ve reached the rim
of the interior – uncharted territory.
Echoes of travelers past
are all you have to guide you.
Hang up your boots.
Time to stop begging door to door.
The only footprints in the dust
have turned out to be your own.
But you should no longer be trying
to get from here to there.
What you want
is to fade away where you stand,
the trek now a descent from head to heart
taken by someone you don’t even know.
O child of God, become footless
to one day become headless.
Heartstrings
Love. Look it up in
the dictionary
if you care to read a human handful
of pallid descriptions – fondness;
deep affection; enjoyment.
Love – the antonym of hate;
the opposite of fear.
Will that do for an answer?
Or, maybe, love –
the mystery beyond description.
There’s no definition in that crowded book
for that which we are most desperately yearning –
a Word to break our chains;
to pull us up from the muck
by our heartstrings.
O child of God, keep your ear cocked
toward the otherworld silence of Meher.
The duty of prayer
I pray with clasped hands – one mine, the other, Yours.
“I’m closer than that!” You say.
Zacchaeus felt unworthy to pray
or to even be in Your line of sight,
wanting only to gaze upon You
passing with the crowd,
hanging secret
and silent among the foliage.
But, You heard his heart’s prayer –
that moan of surrender, lifting
from the mat stretched out
on the floor of his chest.
From that high perch, he glimpsed,
the bounty of his own treasure house!
In prayer again, I imagine . . . You,
passing in the street.
Like Zacchaeus, I’m perilously balanced,
secret and silent, my mouth giving over
to the heart its sacred duty of prayer.
O child of God, hasn’t Meher told you?
God listens only to the language of the heart.
Bogeyman
Forgive me, Lord, for refusing to forsake myself.
I’m just trying to protect (as You well know)
a child from being crushed by the darkness;
keeping at bay the bogeyman from under the bed.
I believe You (with all my faithless heart),
when You say that it’s only a dream –
still, my childish dreaming goes on.
I can’t shake myself awake.
That will take my Father’s hand, I suppose.
Ask for nothing, You say.
So, obediently, my lips are sealed
but my heart (with which I seem to have no truck),
is ever begging You for comfort and release.
A child who has been forsaken by everyone he trusted
(who, one and all, turned out to be merely human)
(especially me), so I turn to the One
who says He’s above and beyond the human;
who says He is indeed my one true Friend.
O child of God, God is the child, the bogeyman,
the dreamer and the dream.
There’s no one else to turn to.
