“Winter’s Nod to Season’s End”

“Winter’s Nod to Season’s End”

Winter’s nod to season’s end and something’s changed, but he has
Fond remembrance in his veins and what remains of velvet skin,
Elastic reach, and exultation ever on the rebound; that once mighty fin’s
Bent perhaps to one side or the other with the tides. He’s come in last
Again; there’s no more north to his days; his dorsal sags–
One of many signals. What was wont to win against the odds
In all winds, all waves always gives sway to simple treasures. The pods
Have someday left him, or is he merely leaving? Here he lags. He’ll find sad pleasures in arenas, nearby bays, or just beyond the nets
Where all the lessers still pay for what they find. His presence draws
But cannot make a living. There comes that sundry sudden pause
Too many, and he’s trapped within an unforgiving inlet,
Or soon will be. He’ll not heed the signs, he cannot feel the warming;
Friends and family call to him but he can not hear the warning.

“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 use the heart, the limits
Of the body—anywhere will do—from head to toe; these, the singers
Intone its presence, equations flatter integers
Enough to anoint themselves exclusive in finite intimates
And variations for the sake of form.  These flights of melancholy
You mistook for yours; as well,  your joys I imagined mine  in the mirror,
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.

“We Gather and Disperse the Seed”

“We Gather and Disperse the Seed”

We gather and disperse the seed, we minor gods in ceaseless search.
No ends exist in harvests of self-satisfaction with their certainty of blight.
And which of us discerns the which through veils of light
And endless superstition , revision—aspirations ceded on a mountain perch—
Or the imminent descent to sound the maw of landlocked ëgotism in oceans?
No one here survives mortality but all will live to tell the tale
Of peoples, nations; lofty wholesale tales that fail
Within the present feed then in upon themselves from wellsprings of notion
Filled with promise and devotion to prove their axioms secure.
Nor time, nor reticent imagination can define
The earthly limitation of the heavens here below a line
That pays out gilded veins of pride from anxious weavers in this world.
How often is it so that few if any see beyond a moment’s pause
The awful symmetry between ephemeral success and eternal loss?

Month of Bahá [Splendour], Naw-Rúz, the Bahá’í New Year, the Spring Equinox

Bahá’ís throughout the world gather this evening after sunset within the First Day of the Month of Bahá [Splendour], the beginning of the first month of the Bahá’í Year, the arrival of Naw-Rúz, the Bahá’í New Year, the Spring Equinox, the first day of Spring. 

A Happy Naw-Rúz 171 B.E. to one and all!

“Sonnet in Honour of the Feast of Bahá or ‘Splendour'”

What greater splendour can there be in all creation
Than that the spectre of creation, the lightning’s grace,
A recognition of the Face
Of He Who in the blessed moment of elation
Outs form and substance to recreate stations
Of the greatest and the least, the favoured
Favouring within a regenerative sphere? Savoured,
Refined, bestowing rank and attributes to nations
And a crown to every whole who owns both fate and destiny:
Light-born spirits hear the cry
Throughout the world that yet another soul is signed
And welcomed by the denizens of heaven within the nest of He
Who made the Matrix, Who knew from time and dispensations immemorial,
In the ancient eternity of His Essence, His deathless spring, His Gift primordial.

“The Whale’s Eye”

“The Whale’s Eye”

The whale’s eye, the elephant, the gaze of tenderness in magnitude; schools
Of jack and halibut, determined unities in seas so deadly, so submerged,
The albatross so elevated that only vague inadequacies emerge
To name their realm—Jet Stream, Gulf Stream—moving trains in gravitas, spools
Payed out through skies and seas and threads
of all things lesser and greater in between.
Spied within the miniscule lens of a single spot,
The teeming millions merge as catalysts for the clot
And in an instant, a wondrous restoration, healing,
Growth, and reproduction or yes! a dissolution of all parts
Unto death, itself. A familiar spirit in an alien world will gaze in disbelief
Or then again in helplessness as ocean’s depths are strained, relief
No longer found in plunging to the deeps; restrained, their denizens depart
And reappear with regularity in the stratosphere
and while the megaliths”deeps declare
In silence all matters of the universe enthralled,
we as they in silence just stand or sit and stare.

…painting at top by Malstrummer of deviantArt…

“So Easy to Desire”

“So Easy to Desire”

So easy to desire these miracles. But think
On this! Where’s the catch? the marvellous sleep
That comes to mind? what promises can keep?
What tests in time the price in days to come? These drink
To fortune, progress, and better days; these Sadducees of success
Attract millennia condensed within a briefer purse of seams
And hedges, hems round all for whom and what dreams
Of self and eternity? Beauty;s forplay and something’s earned but divine redress
Requires questions in the hours to come, those latter thoughts of distress
And wonder on some encounter in the looming longest night of nothingness,
Nemesis in paeans, time and endless waiting; rhymes are stress
Enough! these poesies and all that scansion in between lie flat, a wilderness
Of costs in hasty elevation of hymns that breathe the urge to to right a wrong
While in the time it takes to read this ode, its pen is dead and gone…

…la plume de ma tante, indeed!

…art by Nick McKnight…

“My People”

“My People”

My people came from Eire in ’47,
Two brothers from Cork Island bound
‘Ta leave the famine’s wakes and sounds
And trust the recent ocean’s fleets ‘ta leaven
Streams of freedom, scope, and newer hopes,
‘Ta guarantee a living less than grand
But more than nothin’ in the new found land.
America or bust, they took the rope
“In God we trust”―eloped and on an ark
They safely Ellis Island passed,
Thence to Illinois, whence amassed
Both wife and children till the spark
Of Civil War was lit, a captain armed
From Union’s peace ’ta carve a Kansas farm.

“I Might Have Said”

“I Might Have Said”

I might have said a kinder thing,
But at the moment something came
To mind that raised a salute to its aim
And forgot the target. Like the pebble of a classic sling
Shot, true but misaligned, contention is as varied
In its course as its atomic weight. Aimlessly, intention
Grows inward against itself, layered, ingots of invention
While the season’s end comes forward wary
Of its purpose, hubris, perhaps! steeled in enterprise
Far below the nature of its own creation. Self apprised,
The archetype is compromised by its own adminstration, surprised
By no less a thing than what it is—perfection, antidote to crisis—
More, but less than what it was. Where nothing reigns, love remains
Supreme within its station. Where light and fire are both abstract,
a moment’s immortality rests with nothing gained.

“Naked”

“Naked”

Naked. The word marks itself in age; comments, ends
Infirm; naïveté, by now estranged, is all but gone;
As brightnesses on brilliant surfaces blur along
The way, volition evaporates. Where means were, now are subtrahends
Abandoned as antecedents vanish while the veils are rent….
Wonders laced with repetitious evensongs
Fuel silences, memories in chorus, hosts to throngs
If not multitudes to deal with what is spent
No longer expected, witnesses perhaps, to another lifetime.
There is no sure repose within a posse in martialed sally
Down foot-sculpted steps that undermine the slopes of my Holy Mountain,
Chosen by ambition in men, piety in pilgrims in endless fountains’
Futile babbling from the masses, swamps and natural brine,
Subtleties of light upon lights in phatic summits knowing nothing of valleys.

…photograph by karaflazz…

“The Chihuahua”

The Chihuahua’s spectre holds no great respect for persons;
Howls and growls his vowels at high and low alike, and stands
His ground against a world that must retreat. His consonants demand
Attention even of the greatest battery of vocabulary. The phrase thus spurned
Learns quickly that even if withdrawal for the moment wins,
These syllables tire easily of petty games,
And, yielding, go their way; interest wanes,
You see, and comes again the senseless peck at heels and shins,
The unabated chutzpah, the vicar of prolixity, the heretofore
To the other side, the space above, the all
Or nothing victory of the hundred glottal fricatives. Heed his call,
My friends. He will prove the greater in the war,
Because he prides himself on having nothing but himself to wager,
The short but sweet ambition or the long but safe advantages
of nothing minor to accomplish and evidently nothing all that major.