"Total unity goes beyond the sense and the intellect, and the greatest of poets is rendered silent by the inability to share the inexpressible."
(E.G. Melillo)
(E.G. Melillo)
I have just returned home from my trip with Angela to Assisi. The city itself is more beautiful than ever imagined, wrapped in rose-blushed sunlight, glittering. The experience was deeper and greater than I could have planned or hoped for. I have so much inside that I am trying now to understand. It feels too soon to try and find the words to express the heart-journey taken. This morning I sat in bed and watched the rain fall in white-light sheets, turning the world a vibrational green, and I re-read though my journals of the last week. I feel like I have been gone a month!
During my stay, I had the privilege to meet with Murray Bodo, OFM - the poet and Franciscan priest who wrote the Foreword for my last book Fragments. We sat on the roof terrace as the sun sank down into the valley, and we talked of the Poet's Path. It was good to talk this way, without feeling the need to explain the sense of mystery, and it got me thinking about my own journey, in the past, the present moment, the future.
All I can do is make the single human effort to live my life with honesty, without artifice or fear, without shrouding myself in veils. Perhaps each moment of each day is the same journey. Within the simplicity of the poem, we are revealed the simplicity of Being, and in the end, I am starting out where I have always been (or always Being?) - trying to make the word capture, hold the spirit in the still moment.
But in that very action, I meet the paradox of poetry. Can the poem truly satisfy, or is it only ever a sneak transient peek at the essence? For the poet, the poetry is never complete, because each poem is a pathway; in the moment the sensation occurs of capturing the 'truth of Being', that 'truth, by its very nature, dies away and is reborn into another movement, another question, another step, another poem. And every sound uttered is only trying to find its way back to its root of silence.
During my stay, I had the privilege to meet with Murray Bodo, OFM - the poet and Franciscan priest who wrote the Foreword for my last book Fragments. We sat on the roof terrace as the sun sank down into the valley, and we talked of the Poet's Path. It was good to talk this way, without feeling the need to explain the sense of mystery, and it got me thinking about my own journey, in the past, the present moment, the future.
All I can do is make the single human effort to live my life with honesty, without artifice or fear, without shrouding myself in veils. Perhaps each moment of each day is the same journey. Within the simplicity of the poem, we are revealed the simplicity of Being, and in the end, I am starting out where I have always been (or always Being?) - trying to make the word capture, hold the spirit in the still moment.
But in that very action, I meet the paradox of poetry. Can the poem truly satisfy, or is it only ever a sneak transient peek at the essence? For the poet, the poetry is never complete, because each poem is a pathway; in the moment the sensation occurs of capturing the 'truth of Being', that 'truth, by its very nature, dies away and is reborn into another movement, another question, another step, another poem. And every sound uttered is only trying to find its way back to its root of silence.
4 comments:
Good questions and I don't know the answers. All I can do is keep writing poetry because I must.
`A single word opens up infinite horizons to my soul' This is beginning to trigger a poem in me, because as a small child I think I absorbed the `essence' of Christianity, rather than the `church' part as it were - rather as you seem to have been doing at Assisi. I remember my father, standing at the altar every Sunday, uttering those magical words - `God of God, light of light, very God of very God'. At three or four years old I had absolutely no idea what they meant, but they gradually seeped into my soul by the repetition and the poetry of them and somehow became one of my first mystical experiences. My father, in uttering them, seemed to become a being not of this world.
oh I'd forgotten god of god, light of light, very god of very god. I was always fond of very god of very god. good rhythm to that!
I always thought there must be another God who wasn't Very...
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