Love's mantle

Love’s mantle                                                                                       

O Meher, what have You done? 
You’ve asked to be loved!
 
Such words are spoken
and mankind breaks out
 
the racks and whips, scaffolds,
crosses, blades and chains!
 
O the effrontery!  The blasphemy
              of such a request
coming from Your silent, human mouth!
 
God is Love – You say;
nothing matters but love for God.
 
Nothing matters but love for Love.   
You’ve come not to teach the inexplicable,
 
but, to bestow – and receive – Love  
unfathomably.
 
O child of God, words can’t pierce Love’s mantle,
but one bold act might aright a wayward world.

Soon to blur

Soon to blur                                                                      

There are all sorts of theories about You.
I don’t know what to believe.
 
So, long ago, I stopped believing –
beyond belief . . . beyond disbelief.
 
Rain falls and I don gear to keep me dry.
Where is opinion and belief in that?
 
Mortar holds the bricks together.
Oil lubricates the mechanisms.
 
The eightfold path – a photo taken from space;
no conjectures there.
 
I take my Beloved for granted.
Didn’t He promise – He is always with me? 
 
O pilgrims, I am a raindrop one day to blur into the Ocean.
My opinion is, my opinion is of little consequence –
 
using what works and discarding what fails,
I find my Beloved closer than the vein in my neck.
 
O child of God, drop that six foot pole,
sink to the bottom to find out where you are.

Spinning tales

Spinning tales                                                                                 

I hadn’t a clue – so You scattered a few about –

sandal prints under my windows;

sacred threads snagged in the hedgerow;

Your blood staining the cross within my chest.

People wonder why I go on about this!

It’s ancient history, they say.

I’m like the angler whose trophy fish is mounted

          above the mantle –

I can’t stop spinning tales about it!

Especially when Your wine gets me drunk

and I feel again the excitement of finding You

          on the end of my line.

Gone forever -- the despair of empty nets

pulled again and again from the sea of illusion.

My nets are bursting now, my vessel in danger of sinking

under the weight of Your bounty.

Jesus must have smiled when I turned down Your street –

He’d sent me that way years ago looking for You.

O child of God, the Avatar is the fisher of men.

It’s His hook causing that pain in your chest.

My heart's beatings

My heart’s beatings                                                                  

I swallowed Your wine,

causing me to dance in the streets;

letting my heart slip out a bit

from under the heel of my brain –

the caravanserai licensed again

to traffic in the goods of companionship.

Your wine sings in my blood, years later,

not with the rough immediacy of tavern songs

but with the hymns and psalmodies of praise,

an influence to my every movement,

a blood-part of me, the strength of me,

the heaven’s sake of my heart’s beatings.

When this cup is crushed, when my blood is dust,

(judging the Infinite from the particular), I pray

Your wine will sing through me still,

filling my veins and throat, core and skull

with Your wine and light and song

on my wondrous way to becoming You.

O child of God, wine loosens your tongue and sends you

rambling beyond the bounds of propriety.