Devotional or Prayer Poems

I don't really care to discuss my spiritual beliefs.  Putting them into poetry is another matter.  I read Tagore when I was twenty and that led me to other poets-of-god, like Rumi and Kabir.  In poetry I can let myself celebrate, agonize and be exactly who I am in my relation to God as I conceive It.  That conception is always changing.  I often see the Jew in my poems, there's an Old Testament feeling filtered through a modern sensibility. The poem below, PROPHET, is absolutely one of my favorite poems.  I realize that it may not be the  favorite poem of anyone else, but that doesn't matter.  Its ideas and questions come straight from my heart.

Prophet

September 10, 2001

Oh lord, oh lord,

what has befallen me?

That which I hoped to make straight

only becomes more twisted.

That which should be understood

only becomes more strange.

How did I come to this unexpected shore?

And what am I to make of the walking wreck of myself?

I wanted to be a radiance

but I am more like a garbage can

tipped by a raccoon in predawn hours.

I pick myself up,

I sweep my contents

into a tidy pile,

but each time I think to rest,

I am again overturned.

I speak to you, o lord,

like the wounded Jew,

like the baffled bloodied prophet,

like the broken fated sage.

I take help from any quarter,

even those with dangerous denizens.

I take comfort with the scorpion,

I sleep with diseases,

I marvel and lament

at my scattered state,

at my continued surprise that I am alive.

Oh lord, what has befallen me?

You see, I have nothing but questions.

It could be much worse, I freely admit.

It could be much better,

I ruefully entreat.

Pieces of me have gone numb.

Whole continents of my psyche have been submerged,

drowned, forgotten.

I am the world I have made.

I am a man, dreadfully incomplete,

unwilling to meet the terror,

reluctant to behold the fire,

shrinking always from the worst case,

taking the hand of any wiser being,

like a lost child who needs to be led home.

I shall try now, lord, to snatch a bit of sleep

from the bottom of the night’s cup.

I’m glad we had this little talk.

I thank you, uncomfortably,

like one who has opened the wrong gift

at the wrong party.

Oh, is this for ME?

I’m not quite sure it fits,

I’m not sure how to use it.

I’ve broken it a little

but it still works.  See?

I’ve tried, I’ve hopped on one foot,

I’ve danced insanely.

I’m still here,

waiting for your soft voice

to bring me peace.

Listen

October 2, 2001

Listen carefully.

If you have held a child in  your lap,

tenderly, warmly, feeling yourself flow

into your child, feeling yourself melt

into your child,

that is how you, too, are being held, always.

Your child also holds another child,

a future child who is eternally present,

in his or her lap.

And that child holds a being,

living, evolving, eternally present,

in his or her lap.

And what holds you in its lap

is being held by something greater,

warmly, tenderly, and that too

is being held by something greater still

in its lap, infinitely held, holding,

creating, soothing, caring,

angels hold other angels

in their laps,

Buddhas care for their Boddhisatvas,

holding, tender,

nothing is alone,

no one is lost,

no death is unatoned,

no tragedy is without triumph,

no pain without a holding caring hand

of infinite empathic sorrow and love.

Listen carefully.

Letter From the Afterlife of A Terrorist Bomber

October 7, 2001

I thought I would be in Paradise

but I am in unspeakable hell.

The fire, the fire!

I thought it would only burn for a second,

but it keeps burning!

I thought I would lose consciousness

and wake up in heaven,

but I am stuck now for an eternity

in agony!

The screams of the innocent dying

are like poisoned darts,

lancing the exposed nerves of my inmost soul.

The tears of the bereaved in their hundreds and thousands

rain upon me like acid.

And the worst hell of all is my regret,

my infinite regret,

that I was so stupid, so gullible, so callous,

so easily swayed by insipid argument,

so readily moved to escape my living awful depression

by casting it upon others.

The fire, the fire!  The jet fuel

sears me for ten thousand years!

The screams and the grief that blame me, rightly,

crush me under a million tons of leaden metal and concrete!

Allah, Allah, I was not merciful, I was not compassionate,

and now when I call to you I see the grit of your robe

as you turn away from me.

I thought I would awake in Paradise.

What a dreadful dreadful mistake!

Surprised

October 22, 2001

I didn’t expect

 I would have to be this brave

to live in the world.

I had no idea.

I didn’t know what I would need,

how much strength it would take,

how deeply I would fail,

how inadequate I would feel.

I wasn’t ready.

I’m not ready now.

I look at ways out;

I look at death,

I look at drugs,

I use every excuse

to flee.

I do it every day.

I didn’t expect it

to be this hard.

My imagination was not prepared

to encompass the misery,

to absorb the sheer strangeness

of what happens,

what has happened,

what I can’t make un-happen.

I thought I would be protected.

I thought it would be pleasant.

I thought it would be okay,

that I would have a good time,

be satisfied, get away free of entanglements,

leave a nice footprint

that could be seen clearly

down through time.

I am surprised by the mud,

appalled by the blood,

angry with god for letting terrible things happen.

I didn’t expect to have to be this brave.

I didn’t think I had it in me;

I still don’t.  But I persist

in spite of every difficulty.

I don’t really know why.

It’s not a matter of a foolish belief sustaining me.

My belief is not foolish.  My belief is my survival.

There simply is nothing large enough,

other than God,

to hold the grand squalor,

the screaming birth,

the wriggling, enduring heart at the center

of this beleaguered world.

I have no strength, no courage,

I have nothing but strategies to avoid

agony, and they don’t always work.

I survive, for a time,

while the world survives

forever, stronger than

I can be, deeper than I can fulfill,

more powerful than my will,

defiant in the face

of my disappointment in myself.

The world and something loving that redeems

all torment,

survives. 

Hummingbird

September 6, 2001

At the tip of my nose

there is something sweeter

than any earthly perfume,

yet I cannot smell it.

Every time my eyes blink

a vision appears

of splendor beyond imagining;

I see it not.

At the ends of my fingers

is a touch filled with love

deeper and truer than any devotion

I can conceive.

Yet my hands hang loose

connecting with nothing.

If I turn around,

it is behind me.

If I look over my right shoulder,

it hides at my left.

There is nothing for me to do.

You will show yourself

when you wish.

I know you are here,

hiding in music I can’t hear,

loving me

as the lover I have never found,

obscuring yourself

in the clarity I have sought

but not achieved.

Sometimes I am discouraged,

but not deterred.

You are here, you are here,

waiting for me to stop the drama.

I can’t find you by any effort,

though you embrace me like a cocoon.

I can’t smell you, see you, touch you,

catch you, hold you,

love you, discern you,

sense you in my breathing,

achieve you in my dying.

I can only exist as I find myself,

nothing more.

You would not have made me this way

unless it were your will to do so.

You would not hide yourself

so close to me,
unless you wanted to be found.

Little Red Riding Cosmos

Feb 19, 2010

Where am I?

I know this much:

I am in California, on planet earth,

within the solar system, part of the milky way,

which is bound to the local galactic group,

which forms The Great Wall Galactic structure,

which is part of further strings and shapes of galaxies

in structures too big to see, yet, part of a thing

called Universe,

and then , then…

where am I?  Large or small, or in between?

Fractal geometry reveals that size

is meaningless, macro is the same exact shape

as micro, and if that is true,

the Where  of Am I?

could put me at the very center

of….of what?  Not too big, not too small, just right?

If our universe “banged” some fourteen billion years ago,

then evolved into the shape we now see,

this universe is temporary, it’s passing on through,

truckin’ down the road.  What’s fourteen billion years?

Nothing much.  An expanse of time.  It’s not Forever.

So where am I?  Let’s leave alone the What am I? question.

I have a feeling that the Where will reveal the What and the What

will reveal the Where, but man oh man, this thing is complex and subtle.

Wrap your mind around the most brilliant idea EVER thought,

an idea that dwarfs Einstein’s most stunning insight,

an idea that has Steven Hawking playing coloring books and wooden blocks

that have letters carved in simple relief, “A”, “B”, “C”,

that’s very good Steven, very good Albert

very good deepest thinkers of our world,

you’ve gotten us off our tricycles,

but we don’t know where we are, don’t know what we are,

and surely don’t know why we are,

so it looks like I’m going to have to keep asking,

I mean doesn’t EVERYBODY ask?

Maybe not everybody but a lot of us would like to know

and we put all these frustrations into books

and start religions and maybe they soothe the frustration a little

but they don’t put a face on my location in the scheme of things

so I just want to grab this super smart Intelligence, Force, Creator,

Joker, whatever it is, grab it by the collar and say just like a movie tough guy,

“Hey!  Where am I?  I want some answers!  Quit fucking around!

Can’t you show us a formula, an artifact, a document that’s less ambiguous than Koran Bible Torah, can’t you send an angel or an E.T., or something to change me from frustrated to fulfilled?

Why can’t you do that right now, huh?”

Uh oh.  I know I’m not as smart as Einstein much less this thing that casually

tosses universes out like a tennis ball machine, bang!

whoops we missed, Bang!  There it goes again.  Universes all over the place that support life, no, encourage life!

This is not someone you grab by the collar and get tough with, anything could happen.  And does.  Everything happens!

It makes me kind of tired.  My eyelids droop from the effort of all this

ravenous curiosity.

I think I’ll go to sleep.  Maybe I’ll find the answer in a dream.

Wouldn’t it be funny if I had that dream,

and then couldn’t remember it?







Crazy

If you have asked yourself the question

“why am I so crazy”?

the answer is simple.

You are crazy with grief.

Deep down inside,

you are like one attending a funeral,

tearing your clothes,

bewailing your loss.

“But what have I lost, to be so crazy?”

you ask.

Something infinitely precious,

something you love so ferociously

that even to remember it

would set you to rending your hair,

again and again.

There is a rage that attends this grief

a rage at yourself, because,

down in this same forgotten chamber of memory,

you know that you were offered this precious thing

beyond value, and you lost it,

from a moment’s inattention,

or cast it aside for something more glamorous,

or ignored it because it did not make

pretty jingling music

the way a child’s toy does.

The world is a child’s toy

compared to the majesty of that

which we have put away,

and now, unconsciously,

we grieve, and wonder

why we are so crazy.

Self Portrait

Breath

Oct 19, 2009

Your breath has a shape

unique

like a fingerprint

no two alike

in all the world.

Everything about you

is found in your breath

all your lives

and deaths,

all your thoughts.

Think of your body

as vanished,

only breath remains

it has an in stop

and an out stop

and contains so much more

than air.

If we could know one another

by our breaths

if we could see the human crowd

as a throng of breaths,

nothing else,

hello jagged anxious breath

how are you

hello smooth relaxed breath

nice to see you

the human race is

a breath collective

today some will arrive

today some will depart

lungs are merely homes

like hands fill gloves.

Everything sacred, every dark secret

lives in the breath

and when it leaves your body

for the last time

it is a system of information

like a letter full of you,

air mail, breath mail.

I would tell you more of this

if I knew any more

but this is as far as I’ve got

in learning the nature of breath.

A Worthy Destination

Jan 28, 2003

revised Feb 15, 2010

I haven’t found peace.

I don’t own peace,

rent peace,

buy or sell peace,

though I do encounter peace

from time to time.

Peace is like a friend

who comes for a surprise visit.

As my life takes on a shape

in which peace feels comfortable

I see peace more often.

Peace is not easily found in this world.

Peace comes like an accident,

a good mishap. 

Peace lands in my heart like

a bird that’s raised its young

and is looking for a new place to nest.

I thought I would know peace by now,

but it’s taking longer than I expected.

The biggest problem is my mind.

It’s like a bag turned inside out, its contents

are the world, spilled and crazy.

Peace is not comfortable

in the world.  When I’m with peace, I feel as though I’ve brought a guest

to the kind of party

that’s broken up by the cops after midnight.

I need to make peace more welcome here.

I should send peace an invitation, find a good solid tree

where peace can perch and sing

before taking flight

to a more worthy destination.

There are sides of me that I tend to hide.  This poem really belongs on the page that I've set aside for devotional and mystical poems.  I'll move it there after a while.  I've noted a few new followers, here and on Twitter, and I'm grateful that they're reading me.  That YOU are reading me.  

This poem emerged from a an intense visionary experience.  It expresses real grief, it expresses a sense that I've lost God, that I saw It, the Holy of Holies and then I fell away from that experience and am left only with a memory of it.  In that memory there resides a promise that I will return to that place.

The Exile 

Once, I saw you,

and since then, I have never been able

to forget your face.

Once I felt you

rupture the atoms of my body with light,

and since then, my body has yearned

to be exploded again and again

into  your realm.

Once, I encountered you,

and I have been feeling the pangs of exile,

feeling the hunger of one who eats

the wrong food,

of one who knows where the right food is,

but cannot move, as if in a dream,

to be nourished again.

Let me see  you again!

I have called out for you.

I have suffered all the common woes of existence,

I have felt poisoned and broken and maimed

and fatigued, yet still the memory

of your face sustains me.

Again and again, I call out for you!

Grace me with a single moment,

a single touch, a tiny speck of vision,

that I may be renewed in heart and soul.

I will not forget you, I can never forget

the reality of our encounter.

I can never fall out of love with you,

though I may rage with longing for your grace,

though I may howl with sadness at your absence,

though my attention may be distracted

by all the things you have thrown in my path,

as though you tease and tempt and test

my memory of you.

Once, I saw you, and, once seen, your face

is etched into the core of my being,

so that my death will be a cry for you,

and my birth will be a cry for you,

and you will, one day, come for me again,

you will be my home, I will be your home,

because of my promise not to forget you.

Once seen, you can never be forgotten.

If I cannot wash you from my heart,

surely, you who are infinitely greater

than any power I can imagine,

will also remember me.

You planted yourself in me;

though the budding and flowering

are rendingly slow, though the fruition

of the message you left in me

takes endless sorrow of

patience, I will grow to you.

Once, I saw your face.

Once, I was so smitten with love

that I have lived my days in this world,

waiting for your return.

The Throne of Isis

                        A Very Short Poem

                        Dewdrops on spiderwebs:

                        sit lightly with life.