‘“Sonnet in Honour of the Feast of Sulṭán”

Bahá’ís throughout the world gather this evening before sunset or tomorrow before sunset to commemorate the First Day of the Bahá’í Month of Sulṭán [Sovereignty]

 

“Sonnet in Honour of the Feast of Sulṭán or `Sovereignty’”

The sovereignties of celestial spheres exists to need,
The limitless has its limitations as nothingness withdraws
According to measure, star to planet, king to pawn
And back again; the elements begin eternal needs with seed
In matter or of energy–little difference the subject or predicate–
In clusters round the universal abyss. Heat and weight
Of particles in accident and  by law are so great that seismic freight
Of galaxies and galaxies of galaxies, monarchs and their asteroids, late
And early viceroys and their sycophants cannot pause or hesitate.
It goes just so with all that is and is not His every breath within His dreams
As emanations of the seen and unseen posit progression in the cosmic stream;
Still other states of being thrive as condiments used within the universal state,
Signed by given temperatures, degrees of darkest matter unexplored,
In certain trust of  sovereignty, tales of energies and matters
that will not long be veiled, belittled nor can they be ignored.

—Once

All truth passes through three stages.  First, it is ridiculed.  Second, it is violently opposed.  Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

—Arthur Schopenhauer [22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860]

“And In the Timing”

“And In the Timing”

And in the timing looking toward the left or right

I am arrested on a cliff, bereft

Of reckoning what is left

In me beyond the trappings of a simple light

And memories catalogued, together bound

In burgundies and beige, and with the odd in olive green,

The velvets of their spines lean this way, seen

Like houses on a narrow Upstate Albany block; I’ve found

It so, conveniently I guess. There is no slight adherence

Here to regimen, no lesser well-warn track to rhyme

With hours or days as I would have them, nothing timed

In what I spy within the closet or the dreadlocks of my clock, but clearance

And permission to proceed through standing weeds my gentle paces

As if bound by who it is I am, and nothing more than what my bulk displaces.

“Sonnet in Honour of the Feast of Mashíyyat” or “Will”

Bahá’ís throughout the world gathered yesterday before sunset to celebrate the First Day of the Month of Mashíyyat [Will]

We bear witness to it in the station of a still
And changeless vision, cosine as it is to truth.
Volition reigns with all, and rules
To govern its existence will
Continue till the thing no longer bears its seal,
Its sign, its talisman nor sacred stamp
Of manifest yet hidden Lamps
By Whose Light truth’s revealed or is repealed.
There is no greater will than this. We are
Witnesses, the signatories of deeds
Of lingering motives, contracts, seeds
Of instituted factors in the sole
And universal changeless Will and Goal
Whose pages neither bend nor fold.

“Nakedness”

Nakedness marks itself in age; comments are ends
Infirm; naïveté estranged is all but gone;
Brightnesses on brilliant surfaces blurr along
The way .Volition evaporates. Where means were, now are friends
Addressed as anticipations vanish while the veils are rent..
Wonders laced with repetitious evensong
Silence memories in chorus. Host to throngs
If not multitudes to deal with what is spent
No longer expected, witnessed only if in another lifetime.
There is no sure repose within a posse in martialled sally
Down the foot-sculpted steps that undermine the slopes of Holy Mountains
Chosen not by ambition in men nor piety in pilgrims but endless fountains’
Futile babbling from the masses, swamps and natural brine,
Subtleties of light upon lights on summits knowing nothing of valleys.

“And the World Went On”

And the world went on; their griefs were ours
Yet the world was lit. Came the pyre on the mountain,
The torch the valleys, and all who stood were stilled, the fountain’s
Camphor waters drained, Bathesda no longer troubled. The hour
Comes, the pilgrims flee the oceans, seas, the rainbow’s power.
Carmel has seen Sharon: “Stare at me as you would the sun!”
Know the inevitable is come!” Agonies and consternation
Must bear the weight of ecstasy’s revision, the flower
Of circumspection, precision, and beyond the natural eye spawns blindness
In the infallible shroud of never-ending light, the blight of every saint,
The goal of every sinner. Œdipus and his Ȇblis rehearse
The first catharsis, the Sphinx the last, the triad guards the city’s curse
And Adam’s children well before his own were dreamt in tenderness
Of strange wisdoms in the mind, blessed unction in stars grown faint.

“The Cells”

The cells call out their scholarity,
Mighty spires reach for skies
That live seasons in the earth’s penumbra and expire
Forever, so they say. Turn, then, to odd peculiarity,
Particulars in ornate stone formations possibly deliberate
When once they housed a single evening’s temple
Built by want and ignorance of what is simple,
Worshipped by multitudes within, immediate
To some, an intimacy of bodies petrified
And sprung from some light’s supple
Flight that had a need for nuptials–
She, the goddess; he, the priest. So sanctified,
They possessed a night that launched a myriad cliffs
And in that blackest of shadows, its oceans shifted.

–Once

“The poem… is a little myth of man’s capacity to make life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see – it is, rather, a light by which we may see – and what we see is life.”

~Robert Penn Warren
[April 24, 1905—September 15, 1989]

“It Is a Consolation”

It is a consolation as well as a curse that none
Of us lasts within these bodies past the grave;
While here, we have no choice but to mark the moon’s phases
And it is the sun that tells us that we have passed another day.
Still, insofar as all of us are eternal, once created, what honours could
Exceed this single blessing? It takes a thousand years for a sunbeam
To reach the surface of the sun and eight seconds from that portal to the earth,
So we are told.
What we are not told is that once created, the sunbeam never dies,
Nor does it remain with us for long here
Among the living nor there
Beyond the last hotdog joint on its way out of town,
And we are left to guess whence it came and where it’s going
And what the hell it was doing here.

“Did You Think…?”

Did you think it pays to read between the Holy Lines
That spoke with outward-bound and bonded particulars and austerity
In eloquence to which the gray-scale decibels of earthbound clarity
Speak volumes if only to the ears of dogs or elephants; defined
Somewhere between the womb and coffin, clearly signed
Within the matrix, nothing; to all else
exquisite in the melody of choice, metonymy
In fear, perhaps, but action put to wind chimes, pure and unrefined divinity
To souls of children and the penitent in prayer, yet the object undefined?
Within composts of saints and poets supernal senses  are recused, none refused, and far beyond, their Prophets,
Hounded and reviled within their own brief imprisoned span,
The single particle becomes the raging legion
in cycles newly framed in paradigms
So far from what was or seemed to be convenient both to litigants and followers,
All concave mirrors turned to Truth. Their attentions birth
as the premature in understanding puts the match
to kindling fires of corruption in the land.

…Yes; even the word holds sway in beauty just as be and come and go as always in concert with all beauteous words seem to hold some affinity to one another that begs for more; it is the glory of affirmation; negation is its inverse holding fast to less as nothing seducing while it shuns to die as though to love is somehow related to a force of hatred amongst the other sovereignties  and prerogatives of antithesis, and, while integral to physical existence, are nevertheless peculiar to this world only and can draw no conclusion beyond the present natural illusions of form. Such fellowship is its own demise as is all that occurs in the material universe.

“The Midnight Hymn”

Friedrich Nietzsche
[ 1844 A.D. - 1910 A.D.]

Oh man!  Take heed!
What does the deep midnight say?
I slept!
I have awakened from a deep dream.

The world is deep.
And deeper than the day remembers.
Deep is its suffering.

Joy is deeper yet than heartache!

Suffering speaks:  Begone!

All joys want eternity,
Want deep, deep eternity.

“Withdrawn”

“Withdrawn”

Withdrawn the blessing and the curse,
The dubious promise to the Righteous Thief; restive centuries never
Fall from memory even as salvation is gained. Reactionary lines are ever
Faithless, their avarice remorseless; cocked, the trigger’s in the verse,
The bullseye’s always clearly marked, the rôles reverse
And while the last are first, the first, the clever,
Mitred, the glorified from the neck on down are decapitated, severed
Remnants left to rot along the leisure banks of ancient streams, the hearse
Drawn not by horses nor the romance of martyrs, powers in a cosmic heist
Or Lady Luck, but by the energy of justice and the glory of simplicity,
The touchstone of a truth that separates all light from fire,
Nemesis to volatile emotion from every man’s desire.
Witnesses are way too early, much too late, between the zeitgeists
Of our fathers’ harpies, hubris and fantasies, and all that’s left of destiny.