“A Holy One”

A holy one is born to justice or to love,
Soft beginnings stretch the paths
From the river to the mountain, back
To deeper wells than womb or the showers’ deluge from above.
He must decide, he must approach his gift.
The bridge is there, of course, forbidding. Sirens praise the rift,
Between the passage from attraction to the truth, the mind to heart. Sift
The messages, read between the stones, decipher mysteries; set adrift,
Perhaps he is, but in the end, there is the passing
From beginnings to consummations on the other side;
If he can ride he will not walk. He cannot hide, he must decide
Between the cave and voices from the summit calling. The term of life does not vary; stations and the office are everlasting.
Fathers wait, mothers, then, abide; and as he sees he leaves,
His steps upon the bridge: from love to justice, crossing: blessed peace;
Justice, potentials warm his palms, and affection seeds its own
Fields and those of others in specious urgencies ill defined
Beyond the anxious worm within the soil.
Yes, and some few voids come to mind.
Embroidered organs, muscles, bleached and raw impressions, bones,
And tusk breakers; the clues are endless. Of all conventional thought,
His, notwithstanding, sometime crowns are cast down and qualify
The spaces between the aces, king and queen of any suit may well pacify
Presumptions, asymmetrical assumptions and tawdry tragic flaws
Ansas he waves dismissals and the right to speedy trial with a nod.
Even planets and the moon reveal themselves in phases and effects, their pawns.
Continue, then by all means available to conclusions drawn
From genius in exalted chimeras of beauty and golden Nimrods
In cloister. There an equity in all he sees and attraction in the breeze,
And with wisdom, itself, the whisper of truth in the balance is free to breathe.

“And Who Is He?”

And who is he if not an image in the hall
Alone with nothing but the furniture–
A stick or two–perhaps a glass of pure
Remorse for what has past, and then the call
To what may only just begin to reappear
A possibility for some few hours in the sun?
The measure of a man is not his run
Of fortune nor a portion of a clear
And fruitful day among the multitudes,
But what he must achieve when face to face
With his own image and position placed
Before the judge of judges in the crude
Efficiency of gazing in the mirror all alone:
A man in crowds is not the man he is at home.

“Sonnet in Honour of the Feast of Sharaf or `Honour’”

Bahá’ís throughout the world gather this evening and tomorrow within the First Day of the Month of Sharaf [Honour]

“Sonnet in Honour of the Feast of Sharaf or `Honour’”

Not that what is in my soul is pure, nor are my eyes
In proper shielded nor buttressed against what I shouldn’t see.
No, my thoughts are not secluded from my dreams;
Nor are these ears immune from feeble babblings of the sly;
My hands are not placed firmly where they must be;
Nor to my taste my food what it should be. All
That modesty and honour require are no more; nor is the call
Of truth without duplicity the centre of my heart’s sincerity.
These perfected imperfections commonplace before my face
Torment each hour with yet another hour and jaundiced joys in their way
Share glory with a plethora of follies strewn
throughout my hours’ remaining rainy days.
I am never far from falling short of all my own metaphor, the similes and grace
Of He who created me and the cynosure of they who didn’t…yet I continue on
That He remains the Melody of Virtue and I am become the lyric of Its song.

“I Am Nothing If Not Noted”

I am nothing if not noted in a book
Of reckoning, a record of me, here and there
Upraised, even loved by souls whose care
And wizened regard I long ago forsook
To seek my own blank pages, to underwrite
A leaf or two, distributing the diamonds in my hand
To places I had never been to seed lands,
Harvest images, draw the scented waters of praise sealed tight
In time within a vial or a mere container of light
Enough to carry in a pouch on nightly walks
Through streets which run through my history, chalk
Lines on sidewalks and in the sands drawn, vague rites
In hegira with fellow travellers through dim-lit dusks,
My own Hejaz of endless dawns to come, a bull in ever-present musth.

“Beauty’s Reticence”

Beauty’s reticence has no alibi,
No longing year-end wish pursued
Through the New Year, no final interview;
Absence like the shadow has no definition; the lie
Is gently raked, inclined toward notions, goals
Known only to the fool or to the prophet,
Urges toward the froward ascend for yet an hour’s solstice; epithets,
Then, and envy, raw ingratitude in Cain whose sole
Remorse is that he is lacking as he displeases God,
That he is not chosen, and therefore set adrift, apart.
He reveres his own creation high above all others in his heart;
So, too, the one true God;
stations, then, are forever sealed, the exile plods
Through warnings from the windflower, hidden flaws within his seed;
When asked, “What ails thee, pilgrim?” Comes the answer, “Basic need.”

“Somewhere Deep”

Somewhere deep within memory before my superstitions
I knew the sovereignty of my person, the inmates of my mind,
And in thisan anointing from every other emanation, earthly and divine.
In the beginning and ever as the boy came to his fruition,
This he knew as he had stood there,
cupping draughts of light within his own hands.
The star appeared first within him, then the eye, and then at Bethlehem–a sign,
The promised Great Announcement–to some few shepherds and divines,
Truths that only they perceived, as did I. Written in the sand,
The boy so soon to be a man, so early recreated there to read his wondrous page
Illumined, how, then, could it be that no witnessed sighed,
No movement otherwise seen in others since that first midnight’s spawning sky?
I owned within me every star and blessings of the moon possessed,
in purest adoration, heard
Both questions and their answers without the slightest effort.
How, then, do I remain here but that I’ve seen
No greater glories, heard no finer melodies and yet never once thought to flee?
The choice is open; luminaries of the inclusive
Written, manifest, none disguised; exclusive regard the depths
Of great depravity–the oceans, barriers, borders, walls, and concepts,
Constricted constructs of the man in fragile tissue–both intrusive,
Neither denied since childhood. The oneness of the whole of mankind
Comes now to claim its last hour; its past derision, races,
Nations, disputations, patrons, hatred’s children, cavils in his spaces
Have consumed the radiance of his days and failed. Polar signs
Make perspicuous claim to every rendered tenderness on earth:
Where doubt is, there must come a curious death;
Where ambiguity, conspicuous madness robed in wealth
Never previously known. Such subtle twins assert
Their proxies; nothing is quartered, no line drawn between:
The choice is open to the heights whichever way one leans.

“Bethlehem’s Hours’ Mourn”

Bethlehem’s hour’s mourned, furtive glances northward toward Nazareth;
Veiled her expectations as soon enough her promised Son survives.
She knows that somewhere in between this king contrives
Within himself to build a wall. He practices precision; he does not guess.
He knows exactly what he wants, and from the East come
Three who only recently made queries round the campfires
‘Neath the skies beyond the Jordan. Casually they’ve inquired,
“What are these walls, and what the genesis of guns
And orchards plaited all along the shepherds’ run? Whose images are these,
And what is it they disguise, the vulgate for the people?”
Yes, they come, these three, adrift once again stalled between the steeples,
Barred, forbidden. Then again, their passage isn’t what it used to be.
They ask in vain and find the answers come as no surprise.
The king’s awake tonight; he’ll not fool the wise this time.
You’ll find King Herod’s tomb beneath it all, and Caesar’s not far
Behind buried in debris not hitherto imagined nor have the Magi ever seen
As much though restless centuries’ search, redux; reckon countable as has been
Adjusted by the market honed of hubris born of Ptolemy’s predilections,
Dwarfed and all but swallowed in the squalid malls of all economies; schemes
Asserting prescient views in years despite their slumbers
Solvent in the past and future well beyond prognosis and the numbers
Used to fund their offices and humour all humanity. Their smiles seem
To reach for meaning in the fireplace, they sift the ashes of the kiln
And pyre and dote on what they think they’ve found as if confirmed
Not least by carbon’s ancient age and not at all by what is earned.
Admire the Chinese while they rise, ballast for the Pantheon of what will fit the bill
And never mind the smoke and sacrifice and all that slavery, monuments to reigns
As numberless in catalogues as blood stains
in a Holy Land of boiling clouds and endless pain.

“The Moon Last Night”

The moon last night was less
A pence and winter’s rare
But definite solstice
Fixed but twice, the era
Common to the matrix
Since the Christ’s eclipse
Began in blood-red darkness fixed
With vinegar to those parched lips
And rent the Temple’s veil
From top to bottom, shifts
Three hundred years to no avail
Until both church and state
Were were made to celebrate;
Twice, then, since Christ, the last in 1638.

“It Won’t Take Long”

It won’t take long,
But even so
Don’t rush me.
I do not know
What you won’t see
Nor do you care
Where I will be;
What step, what stair-
Case up or down,
What burden’s there
What sight, what sound,
What hour brings
The tedious first to tenuous last,
Closure to the present, ransom for the past.

“Oh, I know”

Oh, I know it”s been said before but bears repeating:
Unless a man embrace estates, his sense
Of eternity, his gifts of endless strife and goals of regret intense
Enough to merit periodic casual to shameless open weeping
In the corridors; unless the deadly abyss of every night’s sleeping’s
Prone to breach and rupture within his dreams or by the clock;
unless ‘neath the lens,
His page is thus combustible by the light focused upon a spot,
his joy depends
On something well beyond his own heart’s contumely,
his gates–his paradise, his weeping–
Fall well beyond the storehouse of his eyes and its catalogue of fears,
His light is changed to fire in tragedy and myths of talismans that guide his way.
Again, unless all this is welcomed well before the final hour, his pride will swell,
His vanity implode, and circumstance becomes
a euphemism for all he sees as hell.
Remember please that breath and breathing signify that death is ever near
And in these final years, satisfaction’s just another word for nothing left to pay.