UNCONQUERED SUN
Yesterday’s post from the Antinous for Everybody blog,
The obscure, mysterious Mother
bears the radiant, obvious Son.
He is glorious in His self-giving,
triumphant sacrifice, but She
is the necessary ground
of His being and of ours.
Contemplative Inquiry
This blog is about contemplative inquiry
Tag: Poetry
December 26, 2014
December 24, 2014
POEM: CIRCLE OF THE SOUL
A third poet from the collection ‘Moon Poets: Six Pagan poets’ published by Moon Books and edited by Trevor Greenfield. Tiffany Chaney is a poet and artist residing in North Carolina. Her poetry collection Between Blue and Grey won the 2013 Mother Vine Festival Award for Best in poetry. Tiffany can be found on http://www.tiffanychaney.com/
The collection as a whole also includes work by Lorna Smithers, Robin Herne, Romany Rivers, Martin Pallot and Beverley Price.
Circle of the Soul
Wake,
wake the witness,
silent Sulis
of the pond.
Pretend the nameless
are named.
Pretend the formless
are framed.
Wake,
wake the witness.
Wait,
until it is your turn
of the wheel.
Satiate
the self with
the making of souls,
until having played
pretend you can fall
asleep again.
Wake, and witness,
so we may recall.
December 16, 2014
POEM: WEPWAWET
Another poem from the collection ‘Moon Poets: Six Pagan poets’ published by Moon Books and edited by Trevor Greenfield. This one is by Robin Herne, “educator, poet, storyteller, artist, dog-owner and Druid”, whose passion for mythologies extends beyond the Celtic world to the ancient Greek and (as in this poem) Egyptian cultures. Robert’s public blog can be found at http://roundtheherne.blogspot.co.uk/
The collection as a whole also includes work by Lorna Smithers, Tiffany Chaney, Romany Rivers, Martin Pallot and Beverley Price.
Wepwawet
Awaken in peace
Beloved of the sun.
Awaken in peace
Follower of the moon.
Desert wanderer
Maker of tracks
In the pathless wastes
Grey light in a red land.
The door is bolted to me
Confined within my mind.
Opener of the ways,
Unlock what I cannot.
Let me ride besides you
In the barque of Re,
Worlds open before us.
Danger abounds, my soul yearns!
Howling in the darkness,
I shiver to your hot breath.
Let me be open, let me be open
And live, let me not sleep.
Robin Herne writes: “the Egyptian deity Wepwawet is known as the Opener of the Ways, and stands at the head of the sun god’s ship unlocking the doors that lead into Dwat, the Underworld, as the sun goes down in the west, and opening the doors back into the land of the living as the sun rises in the East. Establishing Egyptian metre is difficult owing to the uncertainty over precisely how words should be pronounced. However, surviving examples of poetry make use of frequently repeated phrases, much like musical refrains.”
December 15, 2014
THE MYSTIC SENSE
In his book on Zen Paganism (1), Tom Swiss has a chapter called The Mystic Sense. He includes Mystic, a poem by D.H. Lawrence.
They call all experiences of the
senses mystic, when the
experience is considered.
So an apple becomes mystic
when I taste in it
the summer and the snows, the
wild welter of earth
and the insistence of the sun.
Swiss notes, “one specific, wonderful deep type of beauty comes … from the perception of a relationship between our immediate subjective experience and the broader world”. He adds that depending on our social conditioning and religious training we may come to conceptualise this in terms like ‘cosmic consciousness’, ‘the presence of the divine’, ‘the perception of emptiness’, a feeling of ‘oneness with the universe’, or of ‘sacredness’ or an experience of ‘no-mind’. They are all expressions of the mystical sense, and we have entered a period in which we can let go of any residual belief that this sense is a rare possession, or the exclusive province of a few spiritual specialists and champions.
The way we make meaning and find a language for such experiences may still be heavily conditioned by culture and still be used to justify the truth of dogmas that have in reality “only provided a filter” and “determined what color glasses” we are wearing when we “behold the Clear Light”. But behold it we do, in many different ways, and “with practice we can develop this sense”. Indeed we can “even manage to perceive the mystical experience from multiple perspectives, to swap the glasses for a couple of different colors”. In this context, Swiss reminds us that “this is one of the goals of ceremonial magic, as practised by occultists and Pagans” and not at all confined to still, meditative states.
- Swiss, Tom (2013) Why Buddha touched the earth: Zen Paganism for the 21st. century Stafford, UK: Megalithica books
December 12, 2014
SWEET AWEN: A POEM
Sweet Awen
sing me a song
of direction
down hills,
over terraces,
past old mills
and factories.
Sing me a song
of poppies and bees
where the bramble
unbridled roams
hedgerows with ease.
Sing me a song
where the first fruits
are born by the light
of a sun who has never
known war.
Sing me a song
where loss no longer
beats like a smith
at her forge
in the summer’s heat.
Sing me the years
that I’ll never meet.
Sweet Awen
sing to me
my impossibilities.
A poet’s take on Awen, in the traditional sense of poetic and vatic inspiration, written by Lorna Smithers who is a poet and Druid based in Lancashire. This poem is from the collection ‘Moon Poets: Six Pagan poets’ published by Moon Books and edited by Trevor Greenfield. The collection also includes work by Robin Herne, Tiffany Chaney, Romany Rivers, Martin Pallot and Beverley Price.
December 4, 2014
TREE AT MY WINDOW
Last Saturday I went with my partner Elaine to an art trail in Bristol – a weekend event in which artists open their homes to the public to look at their work, and special street maps are made to help us find our way around. In one of life’s small magic moments, Elaine discovered a tea cup whose imagery really drew her, by a ceramicist (also sculptor and painter) we were visiting, and I bought it for her. It illustrates a poem by Robert Frost – Tree at My Window.
Tree at my window, window tree,
My sash is lowered when night comes on;
But never let there be curtain drawn
Between you and me.
Vague dream-head lifted out of the ground,
And thing next most diffuse to cloud,
Not all of your light tongues talking aloud
Could be profound.
But, tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost.
That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather.
December 2, 2014
KABIR & BHAKTI: THE ECSTASY OF DEVOTION
A weaver by trade but a poet-singer by calling, Kabir lived in fifteenth century India. His philosophy incorporated various beliefs of both Muslims and Hindus and later became one of the major influences behind Sikhism. Like Rumi, further to the west and generations earlier, he followed a devotional and ecstatic path, and like Rumi he was a bridge builder between traditions. The poem below expresses the spirit in his spirituality.
Have you heard the music that no fingers enter into?
Far inside the house
Entangled music – what is the sense of leaving your house?
Suppose you scrub your ethical skin until it shines,
But inside there is no music,
Then what?
Mohammed’s son pores over words, and points out this
And that,
But if his chest is not soaked with love,
Then what?
The Yogi comes along in his famous orange.
But if inside he is colourless, then what?
Kabir says: Every instant that the sun us risen,
If I stand in the temple, or on a balcony,
In the hot fields, or in a walled garden,
My own Lord is making love with me.
Kabir Ecstatic poems Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992 (The English translations are free enough for Robert Bly to call them ‘versions by Robert Bly’. There is an earlier set of translations published by MacMillan in New York in 1915 by Rabindranath Tagore assisted by Evelyn Underhill under the title Songs of Kabir – now republished by in the BiblioBazaar Reproduction Series. Whilst I don’t follow Bly in calling the English of the earlier work “useless”, I do find that Bly’s interpretation has more passion and power. The Bly work includes an insightful afterword Kabir and the transcendental Bly by John Stratton Hawley).
November 28, 2014
OVERNIGHT STAY WITH K’O-KUNG
For me, this poem by Chia Tao is a contrasting twin to Poems Just Dotted Down in my last blog. On the one hand it is more self-conscious and struggling, and on the other more poignant and touching with the human face revealed. I like to read them together.
For ten li
I’ve been searching for the hidden temple
Up branches
Of the cold stream.
Monks sit Ch’an,
One with the snowy night;
Wild geese, approaching Ts’ao-t’ang,
Fly within hearing.
With lamp flames dying,
Our words are subdued;
The rest of our lives
Should be clouds and high peaks.
Up to now,
I’ve been sick a lot,
And the Enlightened Prince
Does not know my name.
From When I find you again, it will be in mountains: selected poems of Chia Tao (2000) Somerville, MA, USA: Wisdom Publications
Chia Tao (779 – 843) an erstwhile Ch’an monk, became a poet during China’s Tang Dynasty. Ch’an was the Chinese predecessor of Japanese Zen.
English translation by Mike O’ Connor.
November 27, 2014
POEM JUST JOTTED DOWN
In the middle of the night,
I suddenly rise;
Draw water
From the deep well.
White dew
Covers the woods;
Morning stars
Dot the clear sky.
From When I find you again, it will be in mountains: selected poems of Chia Tao (2000) Somerville, MA, USA: Wisdom Publications
Chia Tao (779 – 843) an erstwhile Ch’an monk, became a poet during China’s Tang Dynasty. Ch’an was the Chinese predecessor of Japanese Zen.
English translation by Mike O’Connor.
November 20, 2014
THE FEELING OF TASTE
Juicy apple, pear and banana,
Gooseberry … They all speak of
Death and life in the mouth … I have a presentiment …
Read it from a child’s expression
If she savours them. It comes from far, from far …
Aren’t you slowly becoming aware of something inexpressible in your mouth?
Where a moment ago there were words, a flowing discovery
Is released, startling, from the fruit’s flesh.
Venture to say what your apple is called.
This sweetness, which originally condensed itself,
Spreading out, slowly in being tasted rose up
To achieve a clarity, awake and of transparency,
Resonant of opposites, sunny, earthy, of the here and now – :
Oh the experience of it, the feeling, the joy -, immense!
From Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, translated by Robert Temple
Contemplative Inquiry 