5 poems

Alpha Omega
You know me by my work: my name is Alpha –
cosmic love in which primordial matter,
flung about the blackness, was conceived
in groans of joy, evolving as I speak.
Fixed, my thoughts stir life and presently
You know I Am. You offer sacrifice
Supposing I’ll suspend the span that nurtures
Nature: stuff of me; source of you.
My sign, the science we share, effects its purpose.
Search and know me. Valid inference leads
beyond empiric fact to knowledge –vast 
definity – too singular except
in tragic human suffering and love.
You find me in your work: We are Omega.


… and the word was made flesh …
With words I grasped reality and saw
the universe about myself, but thoughts
to nurture my integrity remained
untold. I knew no words for them. Instead:
Thou shalt not kill – except in circumstances
when it’s just. The same for lies and stealing,
but never lust. Lust I learned was blackest.
See! There are no seemly words in use
for prick and cunt and fuck. Yet these exist.
Perhaps they shouldn’t. What then of God? Does He?
Since we speak of Him, indeed, He must.
Introibo ad altare Dei.
Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.
Till words become reality, and flesh,
made subject, silently consents inveighn.


FOR A FRIEND IN PAIN
When He descended into hell He fell
so near to you that you fell in as well.
Abandoned, truly naked, hopeless, dead
yet breathing, crying why and how, but no,
not when, for none can pluck you from this end.
No Job shall talk you into innocence,
nor God deny you knowledge of His pain -
so dread that even scripture would deny!
This he brought you here to know: not shame.
The just shall mourn the holy innocents
and warm themselves around forgiveness.
But no one burns as God unless they fall
with Him to hell, wherein the candle glows
that knows the darkness to be God as well.

… we are surprised
Once or twice in a lifetime
- no more than three times, four at the most –
the world assumes a mysterious aspect,
such as recently, in the dry tropics,
when La Nina made a rare and lengthy stay,
and all was green for months and years,
and her allure gave nature license
to throw off habitual limitations
so that forms not known to science
confounded eyes
that scorned the evidence
of archetypal shapes
and saw no more than vines
of rampant temper
smothering their hosts
in murderous suicide.

Such, it is said, is the sorry state
of land untilled
- not yet possessed of husbandry –
and therefore
like the savages who once traversed it
coveting the fruit it yielded grudgingly,
condemned to cycles
of diminishing prosperity.

Yet they who knew her name
- not that which others use –
remember, still, how long ago
these shapes, that never go away
but show themselves, as now, to those
who cannot hide their awe,
created every living thing, and more
-the not yet named because unseen –
unseen until their time conspires
with space to make a place for them
to thrive though scarcity prevail.

Once or twice in a lifetime
we are surprised.


How mysterious it is to live
How mysterious it is to live.
How little notice we take at first
of things that later make us fear and hope
for answers we cannot supply ourselves –
until we realise we haven’t asked
the question most embedded in our lives:
instead of Who am I we ask Why Me.
But sentience unfolds to lavish each
with opportunities to reach beyond
familiar strategies and grasp the whole
of life as one definitive event
in which our fate is quite beside the point –
the falling of a leaf that must decay
without the benefit of our consent.