Touched By Grace

Who is touched by grace?

For that one,

Separate an isolated,

Is washed away

As every cell bursts forth exuberant,

Every cell

A sun in its own right,

Burning in conjunction

With infinity.

Who burns in cosmic nuclear fusion

But the cosmos itself,

Alive with life’s infinite potentiality.

Who have I been?

I have walked as a dead man,

Dragging the corpse

Of dull seeing,

Sluggish and blind to the truth

Of unknowable life

Electric in the creation of the

Mind/body/world.

I have walked without wonder

In the wonderful,

Walked barefoot

Dismissing the cool grass,

Breathing the divine essence

And calling it ordinary.

I have looked

But missed my astonishment,

Daubing reality

With the dank dross of ignorance,

Overlooking the immense power

Contained even within a simple seed.

Of course,

The quick and clever mind Conceptualised

The quantum physics of germination,

And I did not taste

The end of the world

Exploding in bud, shoot and inevitable tree.

Oh, life,

I glimpse

But do not know you,

I taste

but do not know you,

I feel

Only the minutest drop of grace,

But drop to my knees dumbfounded,

Zeroed in the face of it all,

Pulverised and purified,

Awed

And silenced utterly.

Drunk On Possibility

I sip the sweet elixir of possibility,

Taste the unbound

And find there

Nothing but the self unshackled.

What can we be

When we step from the tight

Groove of routine,

The preprogrammed and forethought track.

I do not conceive the answer

But sense that which is not yet born,

That free form,

Unfettered and dreamy.

I drink of this possibility

Becoming drunk on love,

Bathing in the fluid of possibility alone;

A not knowing

As broad as a river,

Deepening and widening

And carrying me happily along.

Drinking The Ashram

I sit quiet

On a stone structure

Jutting out above the pool.

In the foreground

Wading birds traverse

The lily pond,

Taking leafy, buoyant step

After leafy, buoyant step,

Picking between the protruding buds,

Ever called sunward.

On the far bank,

Peacocks own the roof of the cattle shed.

They strut, then stop,

Heads upturned and necks quivering

And release a warble of throaty calls.

When the moment is right

They extend their plumage,

Turn a full circle on the spot,

Shaking sporadically

As if to summon the gaze of the whole world,

Draw feminine kind to the chalice

Of one hundred iridescent and fine seeing eyes.

Beyond the groves of coconuts

And when the mountains rise,

A dense forests climbs steeply

All the way to the clouds,

Disappearing in the mist-shrouded peaks

To collect the silver life of dew drops

From those airy passers by.

And on return

The forest conveys first dampness,

Then sheds trickles and rivulets,

Then further down at the foot of the hills

Streams spill out on to the flat plain

To quench the thirsty farmland,

Where all life bends

Upon their knees

To sip

From cupped and thankful hands.