Forest Cathedrals The forest cathedrals are tolling their loud leaves. A blue wind blows through the green towers of trance, Waking them to a song of secrecies Between the dark earth and the dazzling sun. What name is murmered by those trembling bells That move to no religion of man's heart? We of the fetterless feet are homeless ever. We quest a paradise that looms beyond. Our ache is an Infinite afar and above. Away from the soil we strain, leaving behind The dumb deep whence our clay has sprung towards heaven. Our souls have cut us free from the earth's dream: Rootless our bodies roam, answering their will, And

Full Moon The full moon comes to make all life complete, But ever a shadow on the broad white disk Mars the one perfect and entire dream Earth-nature strives to reach through changing lights— High beauty haunted by a nameless lack! I look within and bear the same bliss-break. The full moon like some mighty mirror hangs And the shadow answers a gap in my own heart: Splendour of song and lustre of love—yet loss Of the one all-consummating harmony! O soul of man, O spirit of the universe, That sable touch on time's intensest hour Is the mystery of the God forgotten in you! 11-7-48 Page-106

Words Let me not utter five things in five words, But by one word of densest diamond Pack five things to a shining secrecy That gathers a deep truth missed by them all; Or else with five words capture one sole thing, Pluck from it fires that light up earth's abysm— Fires that were veiled by being locked together, But now a fourfold seizure from without Of splendours and terrors ruling time and space And then a sudden self-sight, a fifth flame That knows by a sheer eternity within! . . . Words have not come to measure things that are; They plunge to the unheard, leap to the unseen, Being ear and eye a chaos of surprise Till

Soul of Song I have been quiet a long while To fill my singing smile With a magic beyond the lips of man. And very quiet will I be After the burst of minstrelsy To find at the close The light with which my tune began. Glowing behind The singer's mind, A mystery journeys forth to meet Across the rapture of rhyming feet Its own unplumbed repose. Come then, O listeners, with a tranquil mood To feel far more than the loud heart knows; Or else the King who moves through the common word Shall never be heard And keep unseen the strange infinitude He bears above our mortal woes, The purple of his drea

Here And Now Why, Soul, look ever ahead to the unborn Gods? The flute of the future can pour its goldenest honey Even now if the ear is tuned to the inmost hush. The ecstatic end is each instant: here on thy brow Sit all the epiphanies. Lustres that gather Today are no flowerless path to paradise, But a music and mystery hiding every heaven Washed by the secret waves of prophecy. Lovely the rainbowed horizon, the shimmery heart Of the dreaming distance, but to live afar Is blindness toward the deeps of wine within!. . . Leaping below to unbuttoned bliss, the gap Twixt throb and aching throb of the pulse of life Crypts in

The Blind Bellow O the blind bellow in the pit of sleep! galloping strength lifts a huge neck of night To utter some lost luminosity But breaks into a blank of raptureless roar. Eyes that are suns covered with lids that are rock Yearn for a lightning-stroke from thunderous heavens Where power is one self-lustered harmony. No answer flashes down to the vague cry. The burning heart is beating ecstasy's rhythm Yet the broad tongue is a grey bitterness; The ears are deaf to the bright truth within. The wild breath seeks rose-pastured paradise— All that it wins are grasses without sap, Rare tufts fringing relentless crook

Wondrous Waking If the whole cosmic utterance suddenly ceased, The ocean's roar died down nor even came The vague and wavering whisper of thin leaves, The deepest slumber would be struck awake By that immeasurable surprise of hush! So too the gloom of ignorant mortal mind, That ever-present sleep with open eyes, Breaks under a vast pressure of potent peace When all a sudden the multitudinous lure Of transient things wafts never more its call And the heart is left with fathomless secrecies. Time washed in vast white waters of inwardness Throbs through still space a cosmic chastity— The universe moves divine with no desire,

The Signature: Sharp-hewn yet undertoned with mystery, A brief black sign from the Incommunicable Making the Eternal's Night mix with our day To deepen and deepen the shallow goldenness We hug to our heart! Laughing whip-lash of love That leaves a wonder-weal holding bright secrets Within its snake whose coils are centuries But whose straight sweep is the backbone of One Bliss! The characters go flaming up and down With all time's venture twixt two ecstatic ends. Clutching with gentle finger our dumb desire A slanting full-bodied soar loops a firm loop Of light around some lone invisible peak— Followed by steady twin strokes

Art Beyond Art O where in painter's hue, musician's tone Is the marvel touch of the myriadly Alone Whom without hands our hunger has to seek And whose clairaudient cave and prophet peak Are found like a burst of self-discovery Blotting the mind with hushed eternity? How shall tense poet or keen sculptor know The vault of wonder stunning all below— A never-resting never-moving sky, Huge mouth unheard, far sun outvasting the eye? Only the vigil of the worshipping heart Carries the one apocalyptic art, The power to fashion the whole body anew, Mirroring the All-Beautiful, echoing the All-True! 2-6-48 P

Goddess A goddess rapt in the sun of her timeless self Waits ever aloof with shut eyes and lips sealed, Both arms lifted to a bodiless blue beyond. A mystery burns that I can never grasp: I search and search through void eternities And my blood is a song in the dark with drift unknown. But, while that face is a superhuman dream And the figure a farness of transcendent bliss, The feet touch earth and give themselves to me— Feet that are standing still, yet with a calm As of all boundaries reached and journeys done: Here time lies conquered neath a weight of trance. Light has come down—a heaven close to clay Keeps offering to my b