“All things transient are but a parable”
Goethe, Faust
These books are killing me he thought.
The sun has risen, the bells toll eight.
I’ve tried to learn before it’s late.
I woke to feel I could not breathe
So took both dog and my leave.
Been talking loud for hours now
To no one but the clanging sound
Of whether I should go or stay
To hear the lightning have its say.
“Where,” it asks, “was I before
I flashed across the coming day?”
But now the sun has risen up.
I sense the answer calls me out
To shout at someone close to me
That living is a dark unknowing
Far beyond your reach, my friends,
Sitting there boxed and self-assured
Neatly stretched along the walls.
It is true you enclose this room,
Give it a stately sense, a hint
That the one who uses it
Is wise, knows, has learned from you
Those answers held within.
We both know better.
“Where,” the lightning asked, “was I before
I flashed across the darkening dawn?”
So I came to the place
Where the lady lay waiting
Under the weeping sky.
Who are you looking for?
The gardener asked the lady at the tomb.
But she too could not recognize the living
Man, the fierce voice speaking
Those breathtakingly lovely words:
Do not cling to me.
Do not cling. Let go
And tell the others
That you will not find your truth
Living among the dead,
Images and words
Woven subtly down the page.
For you, dead letters.
So on and on I walked, asking,
Where was I before that room
Where answers were my tomb
And where I wondered day and night
Before I wandered lost in fright?
“Where was I,” the lightning sighed,
Before I flashed across the sky?”
Do not cling to me was his reply.
It’s a poem fest!
I put this over at TAE a while back, but it’s Easter- the season of grace. Gentle Easter, y’all.
Whither grace in the curving world
And gifts without encumbrance?
What is the path to a mind at peace
And love without remembrance?
An Easter poem to touch and open the mind and heart. Thank you, Ed, and a blessed Easter to you and to all your readers, whatever the “take” on Easter to which life has led them. In the same spirit, let me offer another Easter poem, one of my favorites from the largely-forgotten Beat genre. Maybe others will chime in with poems of their own on this ever-poetic day, which arrives in what had been a terribly prosaic time…until the panic.
Sometime During Eternity . . .
BY LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI
Sometime during eternity
some guys show up
and one of them
who shows up real late
is a kind of carpenter
from some square-type place
like Galilee
and he starts wailing
and claiming he is hip
to who made heaven
and earth
and that the cat
who really laid it on us
is his Dad
And moreover
he adds
It’s all writ down
on some scroll-type parchments
which some henchmen
leave lying around the Dead Sea somewheres
a long time ago
and which you won’t even find
for a coupla thousand years or so
or at least for
nineteen hundred and fortyseven
of them
to be exact
and even then
nobody really believes them
or me
for that matter
You’re hot
they tell him
And they cool him
They stretch him on the Tree to cool
And everybody after that
is always making models
of this Tree
with Him hung up
and always crooning His name
and calling Him to come down
and sit in
on their combo
as if he is the king cat
who’s got to blow
or they can’t quite make it
Only he don’t come down
from His Tree
Him just hang there
on His Tree
looking real Petered out
and real cool
and also
according to a roundup
of late world news
from the usual unreliable sources
real dead
I always liked this one, Newton.
awoke to find
a fettered bind
faded by
time out of mind
Nice!