Category / Time and beyond Time

by inigo rey

Hesed (Heb: tender loving-kindness)

DSCF1587

Banksia Ericifolia: Grows in the Sandstone Country

Where there is love, There is God.

A lot of people speak occasionally of God,
Some talk of God a lot,
Some say she’s here,
And some say there,
And scarcely hesitate
To legislate
Her very nature.

But I would wish to hear
The claim she makes herself, and tremble even to appear to want to draft God-governing laws.

Whose belly gripes for want of power,
(To make a better world, of course),
Omnipotence alone will fill.

Those whose bleeding guilt
Condemns them to an endless thirst for righteousness,
Will have none but a perfect, distant God to slake it.

While those whose flesh is burned by the coals of rage,
Spilled on them undeserved, by indifferent lovers,
Clamour for the strictest justice in their God;

And the vanity of wisdom
Leaves her devotees relishing the rolling cadence
Of their second hand omniscience.

Strangely enough,
The actual occupant of the high, celestial throne
Is singularly reticent.
She who is…is alpha and omega,
Overflowing with a mother’s tender love,
Slow to anger and ready to forgive,
Herself saying nothing much
About an omni-this or omni-that.

And one of us
Has figured in this world.
Immanent in service,
Signing forth,
In brightness and in darker ways
The living shape of Hesed.

 

by inigo rey

Honour is flashed off exploit, so they say…

DSCF1592

 

Otto’s Light

The cool breeze is only felt on brows that sweat
and colder spirits never feel its breath.

The knowing gaze is blind.
The doing and the wanting and the having of our lives,
Remains unseen.

But the light that can’t be seen is always shining on our striving.

It shone, of course, from Moses;
Descended from the mountain
And before him no doubt many others.
The companions tell of such a light,
In Inigo’s last days.
Little brother Schultz had quite a glow
As he neared his rest.

And Hauptmann Otto of St Francis,
Far from the battle-roar,
in his Trinity of blaze-bright lights,
At Morningstar
In Morningtown,
like those before him,
Kept the door.

by inigo rey

Epiphanies… are daily miracles.

 

IMG_2626

 

Campsite: Mount Hotham (1969)

Bright gold bleeds along the ridge.
Above it, a high, improbable blue

The only sound, now that insects sleep,
Is from the stream
Chewing the mountain’s granite bones
Down there below black angles
Of white-trunked Sallee .

Now, firelight flutters ,
Bubbles and spills
Old sunshine into light,
While the fragile geometry of the world
Retreats again.

by inigo rey

Our Angels

DSCF1541

 

Our Angels

Some people say
There is in everyone an Angel embryo,
That knows not what it may become.

The body’s double coil,
Our time, our life, our fate
Is but a chrysalis, in which the Angel-pupa grows.

And then in Angel-birth, we die.

But ghostly traces of the larval stage remain;
The faces of newborn angels
also bear
A faint reflection of their origin.

But hear my warning:
Between metaphor or myth,
and simple truth,
I cannot make distinctions,
or none, at least,
That also make a difference.

by inigo rey

The Golden Rule

Truth and Consequences.

If we were to choose a rule of life,
Through the veil of ignorance
Before our birth,
To govern all our days,
Would we choose a Kantian rule,
And make it a golden one?

If we so chose,
(Unknowing of our life’s endowment,
The colour of our blood,
The height or depth at which we stood,
Or the goodness of our fortune),
Would we bet the same amount
On every runner?

Or is this question upside down?
Should we begin in the middle of things,
Knowing all our particular perversities,
blessings, blindnesses
And bent, bowed and stumbling lusts?

If we so chose,
Marred as we are at best
By the normal wounds and sores
Of everyday experience,
Still cringing as we do from scarce remembered blows,
What would move us to place our life’s wager
On winner takes all?

Only hate:
Self hate,
If we see ourselves as losing.
And universal malice
If we are sure we’ll win;
But if we are moved by love,
We’ll have a dollar on every runner
And come home, all, as one.

IMG_0299

by inigo rey

It will not Reach…

DSCF1559

 

 

Carrion Sea (May 1962, revised 2014)

I, silent dykes about me build,
fenders against the sea.

This bitter sea surges in might,
perpetually moulds the cliff, proud earth,
then softens it, sifts it to sand and sucks its richness.

Cold this deep, compassion not in it, nor pity.

Green-cliffs lurch, then crash against my poor defences,
Beat their fists against my hopes, and die in a smother of foam.

Yet remnants swiftly rush and slide
to catch my feet,
taste unhealing wounds and hound my soul.

White death, thunder death,
throwing itself on sword rocks,
But still climbing, climbs, yet inch by inches, climbs the heap of mourning bones,
to reach its prey: me.

I pray,
Then know,
it will not reach.

 

by inigo rey

Life’s Journey

DSCF0821.JPG

 

Journey

I used to climb into my dreams
Of wealth, and power and fame.
Inside their glittering shell I found
Refuge from the pain.

But now I’ve come upon a desert land
The shadow days and darker nights of which
Know not the moon of love’s requiting
Nor even lesser lights of stars.

I cannot dull the ache of ancient wounds.
Rest from questing for an obscure Grail
Is not a grace I have received,
Nor have I caught forgiveness’ scent
On this dark air.

Or so it seems,
Until my lightless eyes
See.
How long a passage I have made.

by inigo rey

Sandstone Servant

DSCF1372

A rock engraving of a fish on one of the many flat areas of exposed rock on the sandstone plateau….

Sandstone Service

I am a person of the sandstone country,
first steps here,
last home already chosen in a place I know,
beneath the sandy clay here.

There have been many here before me,
so many years that the rise and fall of the land,
the worn floors of the caves,
the shelly black ground of the campfire shores,
and paths, made by the feet of thousands of witnesses,
tells me of their presence here still.

And the flowers still bloom
in the winter of the Southern Cross,
as it makes its nightly Pole vault,
keeping its ancient watch
over the sleeping plateaus and escarpments,
creeks and gorges,
and over the night creatures,
who only come alive
when the sun is sleeping.

 

 

 

by inigo rey

Only Love is Credible

IMG_2595

 

Love alone is credible

Only love is credible,
all else is imitation;
But love is only for that part of self
That’s given to another
Who is by the giving now a part of self
And so is lovable.

All else is imitation.

God is love, it’s said,
But it is only true if love is God.
The verb to be, you see,
Takes no object.

The little French mechanic
Who thought because he thought, he was,
No doubt could make a Citroen run
But failed objectively with tense and time.
The verb to be, you see,
Has neither cause nor consequence.

We love the God-who-with-us-goes, Emmanuelle,
Rejoicing only in and as the mirror
Of Her joy,
As the given gift delights the giving self
Who in the receiver mirrored, also gets.

The giver and the getter both
In otherseen delight both give and get again,
Bounding and rebounding
In a rhythm that makes old time
Not only run but dance.

That is why we love.