If the Sun Took You in His Arms
When my mouth touched His I became invisible,
the way the earth would if the sun took it into its arms.
The ecstatic death I know. What can touch His exquisite form
is not anything that can be seen.
How do we make love to God; how does the soul make love to God?
The heart has divine instincts; it just needs to be turned loose in the sky.
Does not every angel know where He lives, and will beat on His door
all night if it is locked.
Teresa of Avila
As Once the Winged Energy of Delight
As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood’s dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.
Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.
To work with Things in the indescribable
relationship is not too hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
and being swept along is not enough.
Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm between two contradictions…
For the divine wants to know itself in you.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Wild Geese
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
To Have Without Holding 
Learning to love differently is hard,
love with the hands wide open, love
with the doors banging on their hinges,
the cupboard unlocked, the wind
roaring and whimpering in the rooms
rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds
that thwack like rubber bands
in an open palm.
It hurts to love wide open
stretching the muscles that feel
as if they are made of wet plaster,
then of blunt knives, then
of sharp knives.
It hurts to thwart the reflexes
of grab, of clutch; to love and let
go again and again. It pesters to remember
the lover who is not in the bed,
to hold back what is owed to the work
that gutters like a candle in a cave
without air, to love consciously,
conscientiously, concretely, constructively.
I can’t do it, you say it’s killing
me, but you thrive, you glow
on the street like a neon raspberry,
You float and sail, a helium balloon
bright bachelor’s button blue and bobbing
on the cold and hot winds of our breath,
as we make and unmake in passionate
diastole and systole the rhythm
of our unbound bonding, to have
and not to hold, to love
with minimized malice, hunger
and anger moment by moment balanced.
Marge Piercy
What heroic purpose calls this spirit’s soul to birth?
Tree of Life by D Holeman
Regard the culture humans make to nurture sentient Earth
and guide the paths their children walk with wisdom, love, and mirth.
Is this the world soul sparks create, the gift we longed to birth
or have we somehow lost our way to squander will and worth?
Horse carts bloom to rocket ships within a lifetime’s years while inner treasures lie unsought in hearts of frozen tears. Bright young minds cling terrified to manufactured fears that lust for stylish trademarked lies and meaningless careers.
Why trade the light of gnostic sight for group think’s face to seem, among webs wove of ciphered pals spinning empty sticky memes? What drives this pace of cunning race designed by lords of hell to snare each one and bind it blind, never knowing whence it fell?
Each trust and bond they split by trick turns hope to jealous slave-of-hate.
Yet in this soil of conflict’s waste lie buried seeds sown long to wait
for those through space-time’s sea of mind who come to break this spell of fate.
From realms afar surrendered here within this dream we wake
to pierce benumbing mindlessness, endarkenment’s grasp to shake.
Guardians of love, not lost this round, nor tranced by the demon’s dance,
we embrace instead our inward friends who guide with wisdom’s glance.
Brilliant flock whose courage and sight gives sacred purpose wings
to fly the mean-way beauty knows and the wholly-passioned sings.
Remember the crafts of heaven’s realms where joyous worlds we grew
flourishing mysteries of balanced life from meaning deep and true.
Eternal selves, let us soar again steering paths of intangible grace
through sky of mind with wing-spread hearts sailing ships of inner space.
Free we fly through gates of stars to our soul’s home gathering place
where in radiant forests of sapient light we rejoin our angelic race.
©William Andrew 2011