Consider the lilies. They spin not, neither do they reap.
But Solomon, the old man,
Was not laid out like one of these.
I have seen a hall of shadows, long dark,
With the dim light of candles stretched along the walls.
The long table, empty, stands bare,
Dipped like a stub in moonlight.
High above the chain hung rings are dark;
None have lit their flares.
The eye stares with instability between the warm bits of candle glow
and eternal cold of moonlight glow.
The timbers drift above in shadow,
Pressing a movement upward,
A feeling that although space has opened out,
The view is to nothingness;
The cold moon has seen to that.
The room, be it space itself,
Is empty, alone, very very far,
The last warmth left is a bit of candle glow,
Like a match on an open seashore.
If my God is in people,
He has drifted farthest away,
And the moon itself is cold company for a frigid soul,
Whose pulse has died away with the fading chord of beating sound,
An organ sound that died away just a distance ago
That I thought I knew,
Almost a very short time.
But it now seems it was very very long ago.
The moon has seen to that.
One clings to a touch, to a sight,
To a vision almost,
That one’s life is found in that.
My God, is this the ethical, the religious,
That seeing the emptiness of a touch,
That reaching down and finding nothing,
One goes on to affirm the nothingness?
Must a trillion people ask,
“My God, where are you?”?
No need for bitterness, for he never claimed more.
But there is nothing beyond that touch,
So the moon can attest,
And only a man will know for sure.
Simple words,
Simple minds,
But oh so far;
Very very far off is the emptiness and tears.
Guenevere is quietness, stone, warmth,
A sweep of golden hair,
Dark and heavy wood, sparkling glass, wine,
That possesses sensual capacity to the very full.
She is unknown and stopped in time, ancient,
But in a moment,
A candle flame, in an open space,
Darkness in a stone roof or a cloudy sky.
She is the dark hills, thick forests,
The sea with the dark sky,
But always with a candle’s flame
The moon full and the earth beneath.
She is the long table with rich food
Musical sound
So deep that you are drawn within,
So deep you are drawn further in.
She is quietness, silence, calmness
She is within me.
Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin stood on the hilltop in the enchanted wood and looked out over the world,
Taking it all in,
And talking about being together as they roamed through that difficult world,
But they still didn’t forget the jumping around, the playing.
Because it was their own hundred-acre-wood that they climbed out of up the hill,
And it was that over which they looked.
They had the whole world to cover now,
But it was all from the beginnings in the hundred-acre-wood.
It was a sunset world,
Very gold,
With far off close-cut grass and a simple stone bridge covering over the quiet river.
It was a river where the Water Rat and the Mole sat and talked,
The same river.
You might even run on down to Hobbittown off in the distance further.
It was the real world,
Different only in the way a tree looks different in the sunset,
Lit by the gold light from the side,
Than it does at midday, lit by the strong light of the sun above.
It was a world of quiet homes and sorrow,
Sorrow and longing,
But feeling into its very deep.
I discovered that the nature of nature is to be very passive,
To accept whatever is impressed upon it,
To take in with little sign of hurt,
But only causing a readjustment throughout the fabric of the whole thing,
A readjustment which is only a part of the whole continual readjustment and movement.
The nature of nature;
The nature of life is to shift and change,
To readjust in little bits and pieces,
Just like dead leaves rustle and readjust when the breeze comes along.
I learned how to follow the breeze,
How to allow the muscles of my body to readjust to the breeze that always came along.
That was the reason for action,
that action was following as best as you could the feeling that rose up out of your gut.
It was a great amount to act.
At first it was only pain,
A nervous tension about getting something done,
About starting something and doing it, to the point of getting it done.
But more and more, as the nervousness is slowly squeezed and edged out,
The acting, the doing something,
Gets more and more connected to the inside feeling,
So that there was less need to scream,
And more need to keep going along,
And feeling it with tears.
Sometimes the feeling wells up inside of me,
Needing the feeling to cry out.
Leaning against, hugging, gripping,
A high rock wall of a castle stone,
The warm stone,
And crying like the cry of a sweet guitar,
Crying like the yell of a million voices,
A fantastic organ of pipes,
With every sound vibrating the air and the stone and the grass under foot.