Category / What’s it all mean?

by inigo rey

Those Greeks

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Those Greeks

They did the best they could,
those Greeks,
paring and turning the pegs they had to hand,
to plug the misshapen holes in the story
he who had come among them told.

Meanwhile,
back in Jerusalem,
it was all unlearning.
the leader was not quite what was expected,
not the kind of man they thought the books foretold;
different, and much more.

They could never quite agree, of course,
so they set out to crawl across bridges of metaphor,
above that abyssal other world
they feared but could not name.

They speculated for 300 years,
until Imperial swords outside the door
brought them at last to a simulated comity.

by inigo rey

Octopus’ Garden

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Octopus’ Garden

Words are strung on a million strings,
crotcheted nets, wrapped in themselves,
dictionaries, in which
each many-stranded knot,
tapestries into unending differences,
but nowhere can you find the meaning of a single

word.

We cast these nets,
poor fishers of meanings that we are,
but never catch;
the meaning-fishes swim right past,
for they are wild
and always moving,
only sometimes are they there,
when the net is cast,
and where.

We cannot see beneath the surface,
glitter-blinded as we are by ripples of fashion
and the breaking and the foaming
as the swells of self-assertion crash upon each other
and by the endless plastic bobbing jetsam dance
of annunciations, myths and dogmas.

Who will tell us when to cast the net and where?

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

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.

by inigo rey

Fulness

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Fulness

Far from the clamour of concepts,
Logic’s deepest groaning
And the murmuring of canon lawyers,
Out there,
Where the voice of the Pharisees can’t carry,
Speaks silence.

In a desert place,
Where streams of certainty sink
Into wind-carved drifts,
Detritus of doctrines,
Dunes of failed declamations,
Leaving only a stillness to mark their bubbling passage,
Speaks peace.

Refugees from denunciation,
Survivors of the cruel Constative,
Seek only the sweet subjunctive there,
And gather,
Each the other to sustain,
With mere possibility,
Trust,
And the manna of unknowing.

by inigo rey

Hesed (Heb: tender loving-kindness)

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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…

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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

Our Angels

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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.

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by inigo rey

It will not Reach…

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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.