A person outlined against a dark, starry night. Photo: By Klemen Vrankar on Unsplash.
Poem: God
'Open your mind a little to the suns...'
God.
A stone word, crude and squat
as the hacked hulk of rock ten thousand years ago,
menacing in the desert
and men kneeling sweaty and afraid.
Nowadays an intonation in cool vaults
and measured metronomic assonances
our dill and cumin.
Your God is too small!
Open your mind a little to the suns
uncounted and uncountable, the whole
gargantuan sprawl of matter,
expanding and exploding – pullulating
with shivering spawn of uncreated stars.
The crunch of suns in behemoth collisions;
the sprawling nebulae
in millions upon millions, reaching out
beyond the measuring stick of light
forever and forever.
Mind stammers. Who can absorb the enormity
as the night sky leans down on us, reeling,
rotten with stars.
Perhaps John Mespil in the small back room in Ealing,
moving in immense darknesses,
reaching along the shelves of silences
for pieces of reality.
Or Kim Dae Gering on the lotus stone near Agra,
leaving his neatly folded self outside
and entering peace. Has he been host
to the Simplicity?
Or Sister Clare in the religious house in Lima,
body forgotten on the floor,
shaken with seraphim.
Or Gunther Hochheimer in Zurich, sitting
marigold-quiet in his chair,
full of effulgence.
And life in other worlds
to which ours is amoebal?
Have they not seen in clearer focus,
finding tools to hand
hidden in the interstices of time,
the delicate equations.
Oh, to whose dream?
