Collection 7: Following

SoundofManyWaters Collection 7: Following

A Rose Garden, Mielahti, Towards bigger poems, On Beauty

A Rose Garden

So I planted the garden for you.

To guard it, a hedge of sweet myrtle,

Within it, lily of the valley, rue and rose

To keep me scented of you till you come.

All through it of course there must flow

A stream of limpid water,

Running and singing and shining

From a broken jar of clay.

And come at last you do – but why must you

Ignore my gate, break down my hedge

And trample my flowers?

Why could you not linger 

on the lawn I laid for you,

but must go straight ahead

(my hedge again!), leaving only

an irresistible scent, and the 

faint echo of a call?

So I followed in your steps, that led

After many days to a high rugged hill

And a torrent that thundered

With the sound of many waters.

Far away and small my shattered garden.

It seemed you had a wider field to walk,

Immersing me into a deeper stream.

And at the summit, you at last,

Plainly waiting for me. “Lie down here.

Gaze into heaven till it becomes a sea,

Until the tall trees reach down as roots into the deep

And the eagles swim an abyss of light

And you too play in love’s empyrean.”

So I awoke – and you were not there.

Only the footsteps leading down.

Grumbling and longing I follow –

Don’t you know how hard you make it?

Down into a valley and a dour city 

And a pressing, depressing crowd.

And is it true that here at last I will find you

Among the disappointed and averted faces

And the wandering uncertain steps

Of the least of these my brethren?

And your long unfathomable look for which I long

Must be looked out of my own shrinking eyes?

Mielahti

Lovers who cannot drink

Enough of one another

Heaven gazes into

The lake’s still water

And she returns the

Stillness of his shining

Element to element

Embosomed in each other

The brightness draws up

Vapour from the deepness

Replenishes the clouds 

Whose distillation

Flows rippling down

Into the deep again

Her surface shifts, mists, 

Shimmers in his breathings

His image trembles 

Dissolves and is reborn

The workaday land of 

Streets and offices

Now shrinks away 

Into a slip of horizon

While the sky’s shabbat

Opens in vast caverns

Luminous at my feet 

Steps of the Shekinah

All noiselessly 

The water walker approaches

Calling me to step out 

From my staid shore.

Not another poem about writing poems…

When poems were engraved on ancient stones

You’d hope some palaeontologist might engage

To trace the leachings of once living bones -

Your furious monsters and their fossil rage.

When poems were made from paper marked with ink

You might fold them, hurl them, point first, dart

At the heavens, hoping they might sink

To find an answer in some human heart.

When poems were wrung out of your sad soul

By sorrows grown from lonely sensitivity

If no-one loved them, still you could console

Your heart with contemplating your nobility.

Now poems are made of whispering bits

Fizzing around the world - somewhere, you long,

There must be a secret somebody who hits

Your link and, for a moment, shares your song.

But poems are made for an in between, for here

Echoes the beat of the Spirit’s brooding wings

In the space between words and worlds, and you are near

To an endless mind that thought and thinks all things…

On Beauty

Since no pulchron has ever blundered 

Into our particle detectors or been smashed

Up in our accelerators, experts insist

She’s been Nietzsche’d into nothingness, like God.

But I have made her acquaintance as the host

Who shows me round the Garden.

She doesn’t say much, but when she finds

A momentary fragility

Or immutable massivity

A sudden twist of melody

Or deep resolving harmony

Consonants dancing lightly

Through a moving ground of vowels -

“Ah!” she cries. She shimmers like the water

Whose ripples flicker with light’s liquid flame.

She is teaching me to turn from the foolish sheep

And from my forty years of disappointment

And turn to where she stands on holy ground

For she is a mighty messenger of awe 

Burning but not consumed in living fire.

Ah! Let me walk with you across the water

Your golden path that leads me to the sun.