In Time, In Time

 

camiMy young daughter and I are not much different;
Little less of this, a little more of that.

She wonders about God’s existence at all;
While I weep for His closeness.

We stumble through our words as
One asks and the other tells of His whereabouts.

There are answers for me in her questions;
There are questions for her in my answers.

Thus it would serve us well to listen to one another.
‘Tis the new wheat that turns from green to gold.

In time, in time… the value of golden wheat,
Baked in the sun, becomes our nourishment.

It is my love for my daughter and her love for me,
That God reveals – in time, in time –

…That there is nothing else to love but love;
God is all we’ll find, even if He is all we resist.

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Posted in Poems Beyond Their Words, poetry | 2 Comments

Poetry Dispensers

Antique-Small-Wooden-SWISS-to-market

She applied his poetry like a salve…

But he complained,

    “It’s a stick

    to poke giants, stir potions –

    and you think it’s medicine.”

She let out a held breath

blowing the dust off her music box;

    the cylinder turned ever-so-slightly,

    the metal comb made pretty “plings”

and he exclaimed triumphantly,

    “See?!”

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Murmuration of Starlings (#25wtT)

 

Murmuration of Starlings

Photo by Gregory Hunt, Daily Mail, May 2016

 

We writers
who tremble to look up from our notepads
Lest we miss, in everlasting flowing words,
our beholding of
the murmuration of morning birds.

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Juxtapostion of Muse and Poet

A muse is not a person,
but a condition between friends.
So goes inspiration.
We just write down the poems
that other says into us.

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Distant Heart, Distant Mind

If my expressions are not believable,
Which of us has the unbelieving mind?
You cannot see something clearly,
when you look with a distant heart.

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Love’s Jurisprudence (#25wtT)

When two beloveds meet –
as the mindful jurisprudence within each
commences,
Thus begins the disenfranchisement
Of a mind that’s fearful
of their hearts outcome.

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Who Stays, Who Leaves

So long as we hide within the shadows
of our own abode,
the heart is never empty,
the heart is never full.

And so all visitors eventually leave
seeking their own light; all the while
they missing yours,
you missing theirs.

There’s always a window to the world
where walls make a corner.
One stays, one leaves, who sees this?
Who’s is accountable for what?

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When I’m Quiet (#25wtT)

There’s no interpreting.
Whenever I speak about it,
clouds pass between me and the sun.
When quiet, I burn slowly,
while others run for shade.

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What is “Is”

A most beloved friend and I met a month prior to my writing the passages below  in January of 2013.  Little did I know of Sufism or the Shahadah and little do I know now.  It’s a tad philosophical, in many ways incorrect, stodgy, an only hints toward that divine experience we so love on faith.  By I still enjoy these confusions.  So, this morning as I prepared to travel west for a retreat in the tradition the great Maulana (Rumi), I stumbled upon this email to that friend which began with a passage by Kabir Helminski; the passage that inspired the remainder of the email.  So it’s perhaps not surprising that I will meet Shaikh Kabir this weekend, three years later.

 


 

 

“I am contained, as a guest, in a faithful heart, without qualification or definition or description, so that through the medium of that heart everything, above and below, may win from Me sovereignties and fortune. Without such a mirror neither Earth nor Time could bear the vision of My Beauty.”

– Shaikh Kabir

Living in contrary to a world (Dunya) is to place that world in an immobile place, un-reaching and unreachable place. A loving heart (“Dergah of Love”) shimmers inward from the nexus, along that delicate membrane that is the mirror between Self and World. Porous before impermeable – it is. Such that selfdom is not a place of space and time, but a ubiquitous realm, that when experienced by two or more – conjoins their essences into one. It is as present as a the earths horizon is finite; as the tip of starlight before it simply exhausts itself before ever reaching the eye of consciousness. If we are the source of such light, then nothing ends or fades…we are not at the receiving end of light, but it’s creator.

My God is not a bitter one – He is not fearful of what is taken away or given, for giving and receiving are origins with no beginnings, destinations with no ending. To speak of God in terms that make Him unattainable is to destroy ourselves, to make Him fully achievable is to destroy Him. There is no God, rather God is. The act of being equals “is.” “Is”ness requires an a priori state from which an action of belief implies “existence.” To argue whether there is or isn’t a God gives more credence to “arguing” than what we actually argue about. God is…from there, one may continue the sentence or not…that is not the argument…it is the origin of choice…the only one we are given in this universe that seems to have merit. Bill Clinton – may or may not have been existentially moved to dispel he was lying when he stated, “there is nothing going on between us…?” Is means there was never a was. All things “are” and “are not.”   His affair with “that woman” had always been an “is” from the beginning of time, but as a reality to be contended with,  to manifest or not.  This as much the case as his affair with an elephant or becoming a famous race car driver. He played on the present and past tense implications of “is.” So, “is there a God” is not a question relative to his existence or purpose… Yes, there “is a God” in the Bible, in the Koran… But in our hearts, our minds… “God is.” And “God is not…” Suppositional argumentation always begins, “God can be…so where do we go from here?” I’m making myself dizzy…

The human condition (being fleshly alive, with a soulful capacity) is to experience the fine line between starvation and fulfillment. Within capacity of Soul, there is no ending, no suffering, no entrance from the outside that is not opened from the inside. Yet we are in a world, where monetary systems are inextricably tied to biology, and nourishment an integration function as as relationship captured within a global physical value system. The equation of biology, versus the Soul, exchanges within limited opposites…feast or famine, abode and homelessness, physical joy and pain. The human condition is to exist in an entropic world that is not driven toward active existence but static equilibrium…quite simply everything is born to die. And a little more is dissipated with each change state. Are we in error to equate thermodynamics and human socio-cultural behavior in their proclivity to irreversibly progress toward disorder?  Are we victims of entropy, creators, or misguided in our imaginings of “order?” I do not ask if there is order, order “is” or order “is not.” So where we go from there, is to the hearts language – animus lingua.

Love and thermodynamics.  The soul is not measurable energy, it does not exchange states – it simply is what we must acknowledge in order to understand the course of humankind…and love.

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Amber Love

When first I saw you
I saw love,
But not as a spellbound boy.
I found you
Pristine.
A sacred temple
I could not climb nor enter.
You belonged to no one,
Though you
Are claimed
By so many others’ dreams.
It was the beauty of your love,
Not the love of your beauty,
That made me
My own attachment. A candle,
Which I delicately hung
From your mantle.
It was a gentle
Amber
Love.

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