And Light Shall Prevail And so she lay there, beautiful and bright And dying slowly before my stricken eyes. I could not see the accompanying light, Or through my tears the soul's necessities Accepting the calm deliverance of death. Yet others saw what love in me denied, The wasting of the flesh, the laboured breath; I only knew the passing of the bride. "This cancer is a special thing", my friend, Musing on her days she said to me, "I have seen a transformation near the end God refound and immortality". And this I know,

Invisible God Invisible God Who hides thyself In beggar and king Sinner and seer, Dressed in rags Or royal robes, Pariah and saint Savant and sage, Beaten beast Immovable rock Ephemeral, Outlasting time Untamed and meek, Loud and brash Singer and song, The silent One, The Infinite Atomic vast Who sleeps in stone Awakes in leaf Flower and tree, Lights the suns Kindles the stars And grows in man. O Beautiful Impure outcast Servant and Lord I bow to Thee.

Reflections I live alone hermetic in my heart While life as ever swings from tree to leaf. Hydrangeas are in bloom remembering The frozen months when I was deep in grief. They suffered – five degrees killed clematis, The climbing fern survived, though barely, as I And sends its twining tendrils to the sky. The heat of northern Georgia starts anew As heavy rains bring blossoming of life. Even in winter the heat of India Is more than our summer's breathless days. One must work. The yoga of the body Conscious we or not is in the cells. Perhaps this cancer is a code that spells In symbol signs the end of pain and death, The million

Awash in Light I saw visions and I knew eternity, The hidden worlds I glimpsed and in my sleep Escaped the body's laws and flew to Him Above the reach of earth, above our skies. I met the unknown leaders of our lives, Greater than the saints these yogi kings And watched my heart and saw my breast aflame In a rapture-moment silent by Her feet. These occult spaces yield no more their joys And hidden is the face that

His Name Was Parichand His name was Parichand, The Ashram gardener. So many came to him Eager to work with flowers. Parichand was a Jain, An extraordinary face. He spoke of Mother to all Imparting love and grace. But about those seekers who came, He had them pull weeds! An interesting way To test sincerity. An Australian girl once said Her way to calm the mind Was to bend and pull weeds, And a famous writer wrote

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,