Illumine our Time

Illumine our Time

Escape with me.

Go forth from all your glorious hold
upon the hollow earth, that churning
vessel filled with pliant clay you seize
to build a higher day, a paragraph
of history your own, an immortality
that someone else may understand.

Your power exists as well
to throw it all away,
to celebrate the light alone
out there beyond penumbra,
waiting for the grinding hours
to have an end.

You need not put your shoulder down,
or prove your worth, for midnight
wears away, the dancers wake;
the sea is crystalline out there
beyond the shore. There is
a bacchanal of joy that waits
for tired sins to dry their tears
of reticence; hope is for creating—
love is for forgetting sometimes.

These are the years for gathering.
Escape with me.
Move down the road a little farther
...where the light is better.
There is healing in the air,
and just a little time to breathe.
The dance begins again,
the unknown set aside awhile.
For us, the sunlight sings.
~

Postulate

Postulate

Some time
before the biped thought
of history, he carved out image
of himself, and in the murky dawn
of consciousness, began to look around
to see just how he fit, and how it was
that he had come to be; he wiped the drool
from off his chin and then exclaimed prophetically,
"My God! I am alone, out here. How can it be?"

And thus, his magnum opus, "Genesis"
(his first, obviously) appeared
beneath his stubby fist upon the stone,
a quasi-answer from his mallet
and the thought-begat Divinity,
and all the brethren cried, "Amen."

But they were faithless fellows
and a few millenia beyond,
Big Bang appeared, extruded from
the pangs of yet another womb—
happily dubbed intellect by some,
and leaving others
with their wounded vanities
to wonder what had taken place
before old Father Time
had set the fuse afire.

It could not have been desire;
a lonely God who needed
toys and subjects, will not wash,
and leaves us at the helm
without a helmsman...poor Adam
sputters, cries, and from his fire
before the cave removes a blackened stick
to mark his nascent words upon the wall,
enjoins his deity to silence
while he writes, "In nomine Patri...."
as the spirit and the son look on,
content awhile, to wait.
~

Recreating Gods

Recreating Gods

Let us sit down together now
to form reality. It isn't hard.
We do it every day
without a conscious push,
and there it is, staring back,
a joyous, often fearsome monster toy
that never goes away.

What kind of wisdom may apply—
furrowed, relic of the wars?
Perfection, then, is not an option;
for there are too many tears.
Aha! To make a point,
that surely is the sense
and sensibility, the magic power
between our palms, and vanity
the joy to fill the cornucopia of time.

No, someone chose instead
the only gift that could emerge
from ghostly hands, that longing look
that history is always dredging up—
the one that tears horizons down
to feast on bread and wine
it never saw before, nor entertained
upon the slate of its fond paradise.
~

At the End of the Day

At the End of the Day

It is as if there were a pall
upon my little universe, intruding
since I had gathered it so comfortably,
insisting on the sense of it,
extruded as a past gives way
and hardly anything is lost.

But yet not so,
it glowers at me sometimes;
its familiarity contrived in myth,
in lessons that I learned too late
to save my pride—
its smiles misunderstood,
its irony forgotten on the steps outside.

I have become too old
to barter lassitude for zeal, to trace again
that twisted trail of hope and chance;
I moved on down it, trusting
on a crusty, yet farsighted God
to meet me halfway out.
And there he was, always out of reach.

It's misty on the land out there—
not like it was, and what I gather in
is not the harvest; it is much too strange.
Dying will, I think, turn out to be
not all that much of peace or plenitude,
but puzzlement.
Where did they put away my world?
~

Consolation

Consolation

Look down to gaze upon the hours
moving through the void of unconcern,
forgetfulness on every side
and isolation dear
because it is the only thing
to cling to.

Stop...where birdsong knows another plain,
where peace is blended with the rain
of sorrows entertained, and touched,
and smiled upon because they still sustain
the present in all time—
the childhood kissed,
the love that slipped away,
the youth that bowed
and stretched forth aging arms
to hold the sun.

Then turn with me;
it is not done, and when
the turning is at rest
there is the rainbow
to reflect what it does best,
the final memory of light.
~

Greater Things than These

Greater Things than These

There was uncommon breath
in that wild wind that swept across the sky...
a surging barely understood, and there
to claim the reason we believe.

Did you see it there, creating? Leaving us
a time before the night comes on
to be ourselves, to shout against the storm
that in the knowing there is power
all the more for being undefined.

How far beyond our fantasy
is such contentment bred
from missing echoes
tearing at the flood of consciousness,
roaring at desire, demanding fire
upon the tinder of a dry and hopeless heart!

Then is the wellspring fresh and nourishing
out of the ground abandoned in despair.
Then is the wondrous moment we may see
emerging from our hands, a genesis undreamed,
the very instant of a prophecy that two millenia
upon the promise of a ragged Hebrew Lord
awaited, trembling, that day.
~