Month / May 2016

by inigo rey

Evolutionary Culling of the Herd of Possible Selves

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Wolf

The “Black Dog” the old english Statesman called it,
And took a little more from whiskey than whiskey took from him,
But that was not so kind to Labradors,
And all such less than fair dogs.

Wolf I’d rather call it,
Top predator of souls,
Hounding the evolution of our minds
from love of self to other,
from inward loss to outward grace.

Unless, of course, we manage to evade this wolf
And, in that, rob our suffering of its fruits,
and so seek shelter from our life in inner mausoleums,
Among funerary figures
Of Guilt, and Sin, and Long Regrets,
And all the unforgiven things,
Concerning which we claim our own exemption from forgiveness
of faults which, in any other, we might readily forgive,
Even though we know we share with them a common weakness and fragility.

For ourselves, then,
Singular even in this,
compassionate self-forgiveness,
never.

by inigo rey

Speaking for the Sandstone Country

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The Sandstone Country

Like the first people, guardians of the earth,

we, too, are in the service of the land,

caring for the Angophora, for Bluegum and Turpentine,

Geebung and Scribbly Gum.

We learn to speak a rich vocabulary of  names,

tokens for an older language,

of Flannel flowers and Christmas Bush,

Boronia and Waratah, Hakea, Grevillea, Banksia and Tea Tree,

Darwinia and Dilwynnia, and the chant goes on.

We want to learn  their songs

and the melodies of all the spirits of those places:

where Wianamatta shale blankets the sandstone plateau

and spills its clays down broken sandstone stairs

past algae-blackened, lichen-patched, wind-hollowed ledges,

which give abundant holds and food for:

Wax Flowers, Blandifordia Bells, Epacris Longiflora’s crimson tubes

and purple lilies flowering after rain.

by inigo rey

Moving Meanings

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Relativity

As our times become more past than present,
As they do, eventually,
They become, also, more one.

How can we speak of the still centre
Of the ever turning wheel,
While talking our lives into the shapes of our wanting,
Through intonation, timbre, cadence
And all the voice’s eloquent vibrations,
Blindly gesturing at the flickering
of meanings,
Tied to the fleeting times and places of their uttering?

Yet still,
Fishermen, Calvinists, Talmudic scholars and French lawyers
Speak on and on with the self same tongues,
Endlessly conjuring paradoxes
From the inevitable becoming of what always was,
While not seeing that,
Halfway between Alpha and Omega,
Meaning never tarries.