Friday, May 13, 2005

Poem Draft

This, tidied up and improved a bit, would make a good prologue to something....

In Aenigmate

Our paths are dark--not lacking light,
but we lack the seeing eye,
ours being dim and covered over
with darkness and dismay.
The understanding mind, confounded,
seeks truth in the grosser image,
finding vision in the grotesques of sense
by which a greater glory is shown,
the latitude of love's secrets,
exceeding every sensation's confinement.
No prison holds the truth,
no image contains the light,
overarching, undergirding, all-pervading,
but every image must burst open,
twist and sway in mind's creation,
be remade to gesture upward
at heaven with a holy hint.
Our paths are dark, our journey needful;
we seek our way with staves,
tapping here and there before us.
Thus slowly can we come to know
the cause, the excess, the negation
that makes reason to overflow.
By enigma we are freed, liberated unto light;
the darkness of this Mystery
being a brilliance beyond all seeing;
and we, poor owls in sunlight,
mole-like creatures bursting forth
into the ecstasy of a painful day,
take refuge in these shadows,
subtle and sundry intimations,
thereby to know the living sun.