soundofmanywaters

Law and Liberty Symbol of rolling liberty This wave’s exact curl And dash upon the shore Is no stampede of freedom: Or deeper where the shark Slides silent in the water His fanged tyranny Has not the sea’s licence: Tide’s thrust and pulling gravity Arrayed each molecule  Of the breaker’s curl In precise delineation Of its smash upon the sand While shark is most subject To sea’s voracious law Shaping his deadly torpedo Whose unhindered motion Is desperate necessity –  He must swim or die. So our thinking freedom Lives by its limits: This skater accepts the ice With its bruising treachery, Subdues herself to it In months of wearing and Gradually prolongs a curve Or risks a flick – Then can exploit the ice Swooping in its pale sky With our dreams of flight With glide and dizzying spin She has the freedom of the ice. So the unstinting Giver Neither shackles freedom in necessity Nor unmakes order through licence For His full majesty Is His all-mastery And our full liberty.

  Furies and Gorgons Blusterless Agamemnon The wind gone from your sails Buy a fair breeze With your daughter’s blood And get a hurricane With talons in it. Medusa rises from the abyss With serpents rising from her hair Each slithering shape gazing With the face of the oppressed: Despised daughters, belittled Sisters, grieving mothers, Abandoned widows and Rejected lovers. Quick, Perseus! Raise your mirror  before their stares Strike home into  your stony heart.