CEREMONIAL ROBES

 

In the cold decayed

heart of these lands

I saw eyes.

Everyone was there with their voice

and their body’s pose.

We know someone best while making love,

when we corrode our hearts together.

Growing heavy, our body

wakes us in the night.

Houses with courtyards are like graves.

Childhood is a sleep, long-lasting.

And a yearning to touch,

a yearning drags us towards death.

I tested myself in every body,

I abandoned myself in every city.

I took the skies of countries to my heart

and when I saw the emptiness of my heart,

I said, it’s time to go.

 

Inside the mouldering robes of ceremony

roots sway on the hanger.

Even if we drop fire in the sea

it will burn for ever,

it burns, a gift of desolation to the dark.

Perhaps history is a mistake says the poet

mankind’s a mistake says god.

Much later,

in a future corrupt as the heart of these lands,

mankind’s a mistake says god,

I’m here to correct it

but too late.

 

The wave of red lifeless water,

the road followed at night,

the poor earth strewn with travellers,

the white swaying shrouds,

ceremonial robes.

The only thing needed for a race

is the horse’s mane.

This is the truth,

now we are here

rotted away in a rut.

God must not see the letters of my script.

Mankind’s a mistake, he keeps saying.

And to correct his mistake

he gives sorrow,

only sorrow.

 

February 1997 Berlin

 

 

 

 

EARTH’S DREAM

 

In its loneliness the nightsky

thought,

Why these stars?

Why this voice humming in my heart of darkness?

When the voices recede

what’s left

but oppression gnawing at my soul?

 

If the Pole Star moves one second from its place,

does the fisherman lose his way?

Does the shepherd forget his whistle?

Perhaps nothing,

nothing, can alter the truth of me.

I am earth’s dream.

A sleeper ending his sleep

will see when he wakes,

real darkness beyond.

 

 

TO BE IN THE WORLD IS PAIN

 

All the red stones on earth are smeared

with blood of the god.

And that’s why red stones

teach our childhood.

When we are children, the god

walks beside us.

He touches our ear-rings

and necklace.

He enters and hides in our shiny shoes

and the folds of our childish ribbon.

 

I must buy a flame-red dress and bed,

a red ring

and lamp.

There must come a time

when the mother’s time begins and ends.

The blood that knows how to wait,

also knows how to be a  stone.

To be in the world is pain –

this I have learned.

 

Red darkness

blue darkness

and the beginning,

the meaning of these must be

that they never abandon us,

our mother and our god.

 

 

 

EVERY WOMAN KNOWS HER OWN TREE

 

When I came to you

I was going to open my wings

over that deserted city

built of black stones,

and find a tree and perch on its branches

and shout with pain.

 

Every woman knows her own tree.

 

That night I flew.

I passed over the city that darkness feared to enter.

Having no shadow the soul

was lonely.

 

I howled like a dog.

 

 

BLACK RAIN

 

Cover me up.

Let me change my shell,

like day, like birds of the morning.

While a black rain falls.

 

 

 

CHILDREN'S GRAVES

 

So we died.

We slipped away out of darkness.

Beech trees saw us

and tiny stones.

 

Night and stars passed over us.

We were buried by the roadside.

 

 

 

SEVEN NIGHTS

 

1

‘Every night is sacred,’ said one

every night sacred

there will be many more nights of longing.

And we, what do we hear?

In the courtyard where we sat yesterday

the rose that was black

opened its soul today,

a revelation.

And the waters a revelation.

The fragrant divine breath

of birds flying past the rose

and their voice

is your breath still in the making.

When you look at the rose

every sin here is cleansed.

Your desire was weighed in heaven.

When I speak of an angel

the city is utterly black,

I spoke of an angel

‘and perhaps,’ I said,

‘the black nature of the city

exalts the angel

and opens its wings to words.’

 

Undoubtedly we’ll talk of time,

of the burden the child carried across the stream,

of a sister,

of a curse,

of an absent mother,

of the dead.

We’ll talk of a mother who didn’t give birth

of denial.

So much happened

Trembling replaced trouble.

Enlightenment came

and you remembered the mother.

And the dead?

How many dead this night and morning?

Impossible to count the deaths of the past

for every moment they are with us.

Their souls breathe within us

the waters gleam and darken with their eyes.

 

 

2

In a garden

of forgotten innocence

circling

round

and round

O human creature

when the circle is completed

what remains

is Self.

And night.

 

 

SEA OF FATE

 

1

Sea of fate

Of nothingness

Of death…

 

For this sea

will carry us.

 

And the angel

will surely come.

 

Being human is being in confrontation.

The limit

The death

 

*   *   *

Visible from the sky

Seen only by God.

Destined by the big eye

Divine death,

Swept away from existence  to none.

 

On this journey

together with God,

in this state of non existent

we’re together with  God.

 

*   *   *

 

This encounter

An encounter of  continents.

God’s will.

God wishes the same death to all.

Will summon fate

And those divided on land

Be merged in the waters.

 

*   *   *

 

Today has nothing to say.

No word

No silence

Even decadence can not tell.

An eye from above

Observing us,

Smoothing  the wings

of the angel of death

 

 

*   *   *

 

The angel has come to the shore…

To hold the earth.

 

This is a great illusion

Heading  towards its destination

Traced to the composition of  fate.

 

what was whispered to us

Was our existence

Ones we believed.

*   *   *

 

All the waters of earth

embrace us

like a mother’s womb.

For to us a womb

was never given.

 

We run to the waters

like one who runs

to the womb that was spared.

Sea of Being

Are you Being itself?

 

*   *   *

 

Now what begins

is the zone of breath

of blue

and of wings.

In the sea depths

the song sung to the peonies

surely remains unfinished.

 

*   *   *

 

For pity,

removed from the land

lives in the breath of the wave,

pity.

As it approaches

becoming thinner

This is the land.

 

*   *   *

 

For we

are created from atoms

divided

set free.

Removed from memory

from perfection

we fell into this desert.

Climbing over the mountains

we came to the border

It seems the border

was human!

 

The border was human

between the angel

and death.

 

*   *   *

 

Between the angel and death

Stands truth.

If truth has a hand

Will it reach out to us?

 

God in his care

weaves fate.

 

 

II

 

Everyone from a mountain top

everyone from the country of stone

has a story for sure.

 

Now we’re here

we were told to stay.

But why does the wind

cut our face?

Why does our way of looking bring us pain?

The starlight on the skin

of each of us,

is from the spheres, they say.

We flow

and flow

down

deep down

to the lowest depths.

And as we fall

the sea opens

it opens to Being.

 

*   *   *

 

Man’s border

is a tiny line,

from being

to a sea of nothing.

It whispers to us

as it begins,

‘Watch out!

This is not the beginning

but the end!

Come off those wings

you flew with!

Those wings

will carry you to death.

Those wings

will bring you to God’s land,

to the blue

God’s country is blue.’

 

*   *   *

 

I’m making a lament for you, O Lord.

A lament

dragged along with me

in my saddlebag.

From now my eyes

are the eyes of the homeless.

 

O my Lord

Tell me

where I belong!

 

*   *   *

 

Cruel God

who has gathered the sole compassion left,

tell me

is this Holy Ascension

an ascent in reverse,

I come down

from the mountains

to the constellation of stars

I come down to the heart of darkness.

If this is a holy ascension

I come down from the mountains

to the host of stars

to the galaxies.

In this ascension in reverse

caves hasten

to show the hidden stars.

 

It is God who reveals

the hidden stars

to us homeless ones

in the depths of the sea.

 

*   *   *

 

O hidden stars

O galaxies

Song of the peonies,

that begins and ends

with us.

I’m the one dying

everywhere!

 

‘Swim to the shore,’

says the captain,

‘It’s not

an order!

Listen

It’s a promise.

One thing only

was given you.

For what’s on the shore is the world

not what was shown to you.

 

‘Go,’ says the captain.

‘Your future is there

not here’…

 

 

III

 

We’re drowning here

While we can’t take our eyes off the blue

we drown

in a slowly darkening sea.

This falling is into God!

This fall into Being.

The reality of the keel

will be destroyed,

we will come face to face

with the patient wisdom

of the coral

where it waits

in the depths of the sea.

The infinity we beheld

as we crossed the mountains

formed by the brotherhood of the wind

was absolute as stone.

Now the angel comes

and takes me

transporting me

from one paradise to another.

For we were in paradise

where breath grows less,

in a paradise of unheard voices

of the unseen look,

the paradise of the heart.