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.