“This You Chose”

This you chose, you know, the lethal wound, eternal fire,
The final cut, the cleanest and the choice was never mine.
This you chose; your arms, your scent defined
The borders, walls, the floors, the exposure. Your desires
Say nothing past the yesterdays of the pre-dawn, and glad
I am to rest the while, and glad you are that I am gone.
But nothing’s rendered in the late night’s song,
The me in you, and yes! You know the sad
Result: that moon’s pain can not know a sequel.
The senses, these you know , with no contempt,
But radiant resignation in the hours of heat and pure idolatry. Spent,
The sentence stands within this world. These final sentiments rule;
The veil, the truths we’ve always known; the hourglass, the idols of our nights,
Its sands, a closing hush of breath at daybreak when all our meteors take flight.

“These Single Seconds”

These single seconds, harbingers of all
And nothing in eternity, everything in being
So alive; so much for yet another death in Venice, the seam
Of what is past as in a single passion’s pall
So sharpened in the moment that it’s cut
Is never noted until the point of infection. Minutes, and the hour
Record a simple cosmic pause, time enough to harvest flowers
That will surely wilt or desiccate in days delayed so thoughtlessly. But
In the common flush of extremities, the blush, the rush, the flow,
This now is always yesterday’s dream, the stuff of self-deception,
Always what has happened before, some weak inflection
Of realities and truth but crudely reckoned, seed but newly sown
That only time can nourish. I’ve lived through six times ten in years
Through veils of unmitigated grace and holiness amassed in years,
Still, it is within a winter’s momentary thought at last;
I know I will not be with you here beyond the death
Of these same embers in the hearth, this house arrest
Of Northern nights so beauty-worn. I am a fast
In winter’s moonlight bringing closer all who see
So little light save in one another; days begun and then recessed
Before their time, and so it is with graduated rest
From daily obligations, time enough to dream, at least to seem
To one another, safe enough for one brief season, a hustle in the close
Encounter with so little interest but in the present evening’s run:
To fetch a cow within, a log from out back, to secure the barn.
While barely born, the moon is meretricious as the rising sun discloses
Evening weeds and as we build the fires and take the steam,
The fire’s warmth is strong and so is love, or so it seems.

“That I Would See This Night”

That I would see this night.
Blanketed in crowded times when I was young, I thought
I’d die–nor wise nor foolish, wished I could–but I was caught
In swollen updrafts, yesterdays where nettled, web-torn birds took flight.
Surprised, emerging sunlit days led me to believe I’d be
Around a while to see the many halloed patterns in the yellowed suns,
The bluest moons, lightning sapphired mists in clouds, the staggered sums
Of every dust-born shooting star that ever paused to think on me.
In prolixity, beginnings, upraised, I bore the finite misappointed days,
Eternal nights, and bore the stench of dawns and dusks, and more rains
Than I could reckon, read, or hear in all that thunder. I drained
my open wounds, applied the ointment to ease the growing pains
Those many mighty nights enclosed, dreaming of more than I could pay
For, blessings both from suns and moons–the very breath I drew–to cast
Me far ahead of furtive futures through to ever-present pasts.

“As the Sea”

Bahá’ís throughout the world celebrate this day [beginning at sunset] as the Day of the Covenant, the Celebration of the Eternal Covenant between God and Mankind through His Manifestations and Prophets, eternal in the past, eternal in the present, eternal in the future:

“His Holiness Abraham, on Him be peace, made a covenant concerning His Holiness Moses and gave the glad-tidings of His coming. His Holiness Moses made a covenant concerning the Promised One, i.e. His Holiness Christ, and announced the good news of His Manifestation to the world. His Holiness Christ made a covenant concerning the Paraclete and gave the tidings of His coming. His Holiness the Prophet Muhammad made a covenant concerning His Holiness the Báb and the Báb was the One promised by Muhammad, for Muhammad gave the tidings of His coming. The Báb made a Covenant concerning the Blessed Beauty of Bahá’u'lláh and gave the glad-tidings of His coming for the Blessed Beauty was the One promised by His Holiness the Báb. Bahá’u'lláh made a covenant concerning a promised One who will become manifest after one thousand or thousands of years. –`Abdu’l-Bahá, Bahá’í World Faith

 

 

 

 

As the sea swells, so the Covenant remains, promises fulfilled.
Through Abraham the Friend of God, and Moses, Giver
Of The Law; fruited and confirmed in Jesus Son of Mary given
In His Person more–the Love of God–and through His Will,
Submission under God in Hijáz through Muhammad, Seal of Prophets;
From the East, Lord Krishna of The Three, The holiness of Buddha in Purity;
The Fires of Zoroaster from the mountain; security from casuistry
Within the Witness of The Báb, and Justice in Bahá’u'lláh
`gainst the nursery rhymes of sophists
And the worship of Creation over He who did create
The whole with but a single Word, “Be!” Hosts exclaim and expiate
Their cavils at the Word through numbers, and the terror of the tribes.
Armies propagate
Their synergies against the tide of history, bow the knee to what they rape,
And call it truth. By God! The earth is weary of their weight.
The Word alone remains; the Covenant alone withstands this dreary freight.

“That I Am”

“That I Am”

That I am complex is not entirely true
Unless the immaterial is of some account;
The spiritual, a string of mental pearls that mount
The stage as nothing in the eyes of men who’ll sue
For portions of the pie in all they do
Expecting ultimate rewards for civil interaction, an account
With post-dated cheques ranged in perpetual emergency to surmount
An utter waste of precocious weeks and precious years. I rendezvous
With marked time and no specific gravity in the run of history
Rising, falling, finding no final cradle nor bed but in a phrase
Or sentence here and there advancing something in the flow
From one second to another that renders me an inhalation in the afterglow
Of all souls’ exhalation. I am least in expectations buried in the mystery
Of all that’s motionless to these spirits, the very sun,
itself, a captive in the smoke and haze
In an endless cusp. I act the actuary to the least of bare necessities
Of bodies in their purgatories, weathered penitents in hell, and prey
To every passing thought and lethal bleedings of the casual phrase,
Well kneaded to a perfect clause. I become the spice of makeshift recipes
Of shifting syntax–every sentence couched in the indicative, the remedy
For every bloated enclave, an anomaly to all while spurning uses of case
And number to be so much more. Something just this side of praise
Surpasses jaundiced truth amongst them, arranged in litanies
And bound in volumes of the local librarie or in a much too public library,
I am a chance but intimate cannon in the random cloister of a momentary clique
Whose glue is nothing less than fear in solitary midnights and certain lust
For eternal reunion with but lightning balls in the darkness in the trust
That where two or more within a single space aspire to seek
A mortal blessing, there will be weeping and the gnashing of teeth.

“The Finite Question”

“The Finite Question”

The finite question, thank you very much,
Will do me fine, my friend, and nothing more.
Not “Why?” But rather “Who?” or “What?” The core
Is well within my reach within a lifetime. Touch
A heart within my range, and ask me “When?”
Or “Where?” or even “How?” and I am whole,
No more than any man must be, for when I troll
The deeps for useful answers to finite human ends,
I come equipped as any in the crowd
Because I walk the earth, and from the mind,
From human blindness come all answers to the blind,
And be assured we are all blind. The infinite, the “Why?”a loud
And brash defiance in defense within me roars, “I am no fool,
Nor prophet! I speak nothing from divinity,
but from a simple earthly rule.

Bahá’ís throughout the world gather today to celebrate the First Day of the Month of Qawl [Speech] “Sonnet in Honour of the Feast of Qawl or ‘Speech’”

“Sonnet in Honour of the Feast of Qawl or ‘Speech’”

Except to praise Creation and its Source,
Of what use are tongues, and what of speech
If not to practice affirmation, and to reach
Beyond the baser nature–to stay the course
Of destinies and mighty histories,
Ensure the memory of battle lines
Between the Greater World and the Lesser we find
We must occupy for a time–the lies and inconsistencies
Within the present tense? Respeak irrelevant truth
Of vain imaginings of the “important” against the backdrop of the Word,
The “most important,” the conscious choice between what we have heard
With clarity within the heart and what we have been told of old. Roots
And tendrils of hypocrisy are struck dumb with but a look,
Surely. These, the Leaves and Boughs of Sadratu’l-Muntaha, Branches
never silent as from out the The Primal Mouthpiece, the Perspicuous Book.

“Sad You Say”

Sad you say; I knew you meant it;
Yes, my sadness drained through your fingers
Leaving little more than moisture. Something of me lingers
With you that you own is yours. Summits
Of either joy or pain remain to bruise the heart, the limits
Of the body, anywhere from head to toe; singers
Intone its presence, equations flatter integers
Enough to satisfy themselves in exclusive in finite intimates
And variations for the sake of form.  That melancholy
You mistook for yours as your joys I imagined in the mirror
Mine, and neither of us were the wiser in the final calculation.
If one of us is right, we’ll see our satisfaction and salvation
In what little time remains to us in life; the eternal holy
Light is never long in coming. If one of us is wrong,
…there is no deliverer.

“She Drops Her Mysteries”

She drops her mysteries, her veiled hints,
And off! “And I’ll be back,” she says, she will
Return with more. The wineglass chilled,
He’s left to savour what remains, discarded lint
From promises that have no manners. What remains
Is no concern: “We’ll touch on that when I return…”
And in the vagaries of something learned
In all of this lies a pattern, some blue vein
Of thought, a misnomer finely wrought
In filigree though no one really cares to hear the tale. Here,
Perhaps, the story should end, so then of course he waits, preferring fear
To anger in the end to fuel the blight and conjure bitter thoughts
That were the table turned there’d be a fresher start,
A simple dinner leaning more toward matter and very little art.

“The Cul-de-sac”

The cul-de sac within a maze does not wait
For introductions from the chair but bends the warp in time
To suit the labyrinth of audience, tempo and the rhyme
No greater than space required for one more trophy, a gilded plate
Or just another knickknack on the shelf; the current season’s wake
Allows so little time to plan for sudden guests whose line-up
At the door’s so crudely cumbersome and misaligned
That any gust of wind or shallow breeze contemplates
An exodus and the elevation of a queue to the rank of stampede.
No, we need no fire to raise alarms and no petrels to sing
The hourly anthem. Still it’s not so much what is, but what’s developing
That throws all order to the winds and what’s believed
Trumps what’s been gained upstaging all former rectitude
And satisfaction, leaving grace disgraced and little left but certitude.