Altar Boy At the altar in gown and surplus, black and white And ignorant. He speaks and I recite The litany of litanies, the Mass At five a.m. I watch him slowly pass The Eucharist across the sanctified wine. Little do I know, the grand design Escapes my childhood soul, my unformed mind. This father-priest fearsome yet not unkind, Rarely a gentle word escapes his tongue, Now turns, beatified, the bell is rung, The sacramental host is served, Christ's blood From wine, body from bread, the holy rood Blesses us. Service done I leave The chancel watching shrunken widows grieve Unaware of what will be my fate In future years when my deed

To the Divine Creatrix The cherry in a moment of ecstasy Awakened me to presences divine And the hidden truth of life's divinity Of which all Nature is the living sign. Although the radiance of blossoms brief The light within their petals outlasts time And now I see perfection in a leaf And earth to godlike vision known sublime. The plenitudes of heaven here descend, Miraculous we walk in fields of light, The darkness in our natures doomed to end As is the lonely reign of death and night. For now a sound within the silence stirs, The heavens and the earth claimed duly Hers.

Samadhi Offerings We aspire through the medium of flowers And on the marble coping lay our prayers Attending not the minutes nor the hours Or all the pressing needs of life's affairs. We kneel and raise our fragrant offerings Solemnly among the incense spires And ask in human ways for human things Healing of the ill, the heart's desires, Decent of peace into our fractured breasts Or strength to face fi

Move On, Move On I thought I knew the province of the soul, Untouched by human grief and tragedy But now I walk unmindful of the goal Caught in a tape-loop of past memory. Beset by poignancy and moved to tears By others' pain and sorrow I can taste Or to impotent anger at the years Of inability to keep apace My spirit's soaring in my anguished mind. I know that all the love the heart could bear Remains a constant though the eyes are blind And blankly at the future's brilliance stare. "Move on, move on", the timeless voices call "Rise up and cast from thee Death's sombre pall."

At Journey^s End.htm At Journey's End At the precipice I look upon the sea, The crash and spume and foam a million years Anointing rocks and cliffs; the memory Of youth returns, the ship of God appears And on the ocean's lap cradled I wait My destiny, beginning of new time. The soul within knows the body's fate And wakes us from our lethargy to climb The mystic mountain, seek the cave within And tend the hearth where burns the spirit's flame. Undeterred by sorrow, unmoved by sin It compels us to exceed ourselves, reclaim The vision and the beauty once our own And wideness that embraces life and death, The slow unmasking of that we would enthrone,

Forerunners of the Future^s Paradigm.htm Forerunners of the Future's Paradigm I see a figure hovering, a face Draw near to mine that slowly disappears Yet still is there, Her profile filling space, A guardian of the unnumbered years. When will we look again into those eyes And place our heads on Her white-sandaled feet, Not only glimpsed on life's peripheries But in Her fire, intolerable and sweet Burn the remnants of old mortality That from the ego's ash soul may rise Triumphant as a Phoenix from the sea Soaring to the halls of Paradise To plunge once more to earth's predestined shore And meet the Mother shorn of the garbs of time, On sacred soil

The Important Business of the World The important business of the world goes on In this an age of anonymity, The time of small entrepreneurs is gone Lost to a faceless corporate entity. Unmasked it is but greed that fuels this fall, An unconcern for quality and care Apathy towards the good of all, Impersonal, egregious and unfair. Our life has changed and each unconscious choice Effects the fabric of our human dress, Fanatic sects to evil's play give voice, Man suffers from the soul's enforced duress. Computers unite us and cell phones keep us close, What need of vague telepathy have we Or the spirit's communi

The Joyful Quest In every field a fragrant lily grew On every woodland edge a violet, And I amidst the waving grasses knew A peace that no misfortune could beset. But I was wrong, the calm not deep enough And beaten by the raging winds of fate Foundered lost in some dark nether trough Companioned by the earth alone to wait The singing of myself upon the way, Strength again to face the Furies' wrath, Sorrow's debt to life in full repay And bid my being take the sunlit path. For dark surrounds and treacherous the night When ignorance and enmity abound, I pray in silence for a ray of light, Hope regained the joyful quest refound

Now the Spring How suddenly forsythia appears, As if the death of a thousand nights and days Lost in a crypt of the uncounted years Illumined by its gold awakening rays Exposed, a vain illusion proved or dream Of darkness' legions hoping still to hide Beneath the caul of ignorance and seem A solid front to truth and light denied. But now the Spring and facing us the dawn, A consciousness with power to awake The hidden truth in man no more a pawn Of nether Lords or sad divine mistake. Eternal in us burns the quenchless flame, A spark of God consuming ignorance, Attachment and desire's specious claim; Rapid now towards God the so

His Gifts to Us Requite The butterfly asleep in its cocoon Amid the clamorous acts of humankind, The white narcissus gazing at the moon, Slowly my path through miracle I find And solace in the burning of the day. The fragrance of the lilacs slakes my thirst For joy on the unfathomable way And beauty on which our human souls were nursed. Growing things in wise simplicity Follow their progenitor the sun And we who seek a distant destiny Knowing that we hardly have begun The work for which we came, to divinise These transient mortal forms for God's delight, Marry earth to heaven's vaster skies, Make all divine, His gifts