For Children Only (revised)

The gentle monsters
live just over there across the hill,
and there are those who will attest
to their unerring skill
in the selection of their kill,
for they are kind, and wise and good.
Their weaponry is sanguine sweetness,
eyes upon the prize of triumph;
burial is for another's tears, not theirs,
for buried consciousness is quite enough.

And though the stain remain
upon the yellowed pages, there is more,
for war in constancy insures
a generous, perpetual supply
of heroes.
~

My Impossible Dream

To find and elect leaders who will not lie to us. Is that unreasonable? Is that too much to desire? Here in the land of the free, what kind
of freedom is that?

Reflections on Spirit Reality

If life is just what it appears
and that which we may test,
then we are just the lonely ones--
looking out between the bars
of bones, and dressed
imprudently in softest armor
spun of flesh.

A spirit may not laugh
at such a spectacle--
may not collapse in tears
as wonder such as this
is contemplated...years
of such illusion form
the phalanx of our refuge,
make our outer gates secure.

The camp is pitched upon
the edge of darkening days.
The loss of sunlight only marks
the end of fading time; one may
crumble it between the fingers
as grave dust, and turn away
to consciousness like reborn youth
inside unending day.

Perhaps we need not turn away.
It may be just remembering
that we are visitors upon the earth,
each one a changing chrysalis
beneath the light of changeless love.
Another metamorphosis is ours,
and ours again to be.
~

Molokai

I'm an island,
though aware that old John Donne
would never treat me so. He didn't know
that there are particles of me
that I would never show to anyone
...could not; the sacrifice
may not be contemplated, now
or even then. I happily
maintain the sham
that is this body, fondly gathering
my little evils deep into the nest.
Once bursting forth, they rest within
until I call them, dressed again
in camouflage.

Do not molest my island, for
not I, nor you could bear it.
Let no priest, no lover probe
beneath my skin where sepsis lies
protected from the truth,
and let no friend believe
when some seductive creed
flows trippingly across my tongue.

I am an island, here for you to love--
you who are above
a superficial loyalty,
you whom I can count on
to see past the scars--
not to look at me too closely,
never to possess me as I am,
but merely hold the fantasy
of what I wish to be.
~

To my son

The signposts come along much faster, now.
And I fear most of all not my own death
or even your own sense of loss or grief,
but my betrayal, for I cannot go
upon the road to everlasting life
that you will travel, reaching for my hand
and at the close releasing it as I
release your paper lord--and then I die
without your blest assurance
that I made him mine.

You cannot understand the god I breathe,
the one who breathes in me also-- the one
who holds his peace and thus enables me
in dying, to inflict more pain, for if
I make an honest life and then in death
deceive, I do not pull away your prayers
but neither do I then impart the love
I hold within my chest. For I do not
beneath this tent address your god or your
devotion; and thus become for you
the merest husk to blow away.

How may I speak to you of mystery?
How may I share with you
a cosmos that embraces all--a love unstoppable?
If I could creep with you upon my knees
into a throne room in the stratosphere
that our old fathers fabricated in
their heads, then I would plead that you
perceive a later portrait of
transcendence.

Then will you let me grieve with you
that you must grieve eternal loss?
(while in my heart I know with your
same certainty the opposite is true)
--That I remove the father of
the lord we love, as I suffuse a
deity beneath that canopy of truth.
I might explain forever what I know
of that supreme and drowning ocean,
overwhelming fear--but knowing inwardly,
it is what you may never see.

You own a most capricious source
of immortality. Of after life,. I do not doubt,
but see it through another spirit lens
that you have spurned, as I in turn
have laid your own aside.
There is double dying as the price
for glad reunion, and for one of us
in--creed-able surprise.
~

The Legacy of Helen Keller

We thought to care for her, to give her life
inside her tomb,
surrounding her with sound and sight
though second-hand, with all the light
of knowledge and the color of our joie
de vivre. We would create in her
a channel to a world she couldn't understand--
then revel in her gratitude.

What irony, that she, the partial woman
that we playful gods created
showed her partiality to other suns she knew
that we did not. Outrageous!
She the teacher that we had to teach
to learn? She, the one who found serenity
in that rich silence unoccluded by
the lightning swords, the battle hymns,
the marchers' vanity called truth.

No, Helen's sight emerges from a realm
that we, encumbered by the ear and eye,
must be denied, lest she let us in to see...
lest she share with us the symphony
upon her private stage, and via
some miraculous device that she
would like to give away to us who wear
our blindfolds much too readily.

I must confess to jealousy
sequestered in my shadowed room,
upon my little bench, and wishing
that I knew what Helen did, and had
resource to reach into my dark
and bring out light, too magnificent
for me alone to keep.
~

Revelation

Inside the chamber in the earth
the darkness teaches,

never ceases, though this whirling ball
sets forth its glory in a thousand frames.

Pain is the carrot on the stick, sacrifice
and sorrow just the stuff that will not sell--

yet through the stifled sobs, it resonates,
and though it gives us tears

it is the spirit provenance
that lets us travel back upon the years

and find humanity within-- locate the self
distorted, broken, brother to the adam

and the eve scarcely able to remember
paradise. The newer heaven and earth

is said to leave behind
the sorrow and the sighs

but they are gifts that mold us still
and hammer on our consciousness

that we who seek the new Jerusalem
will find it in the shroud.

I saw the broken men walk from the mines
and when I saw their eyes, I hurt like them...

I loved them, then, the black upon their skin.
I loved the knowing that they never would

grow old, their dusted lungs would be my own,
their breath grown shallow, drowning me...

that from the gift of tragedy I was enchained
within those other hearts, admitted without test,

without a crumbling document
to certify my worth before the fellowship

of those repulsive soil-stained arms
embracing me.

There is no choosing grace like this,
no pain accessible, no paradise

to promise sweetness,
for of all it is the gift most free...

down in the chamber of the earth
where wisdom hides within the dark

beneath the guise of agony.
~