Sing To Me Softly Of Earth - Part One
Jaleel Akbash - Unsplash
Authored by A. S. Kline © Copyright 1999 All Rights Reserved.
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No Mind
Under the dark tree, no Mind made us.
In the gold desert flowering after rain,
in the blue desert, no Mind watching us.
Hedges dark-scented.
Lanes where stone steps glisten,
where the wind quickens. No Mind.
And no Mind watches now as we walk back
towards the past ages, free of gods, full of feeling.
Under the sky where no-one knew us, we knew ourselves.
On the grasslands, the savannahs,
on the steppes, the prairies,
as the creatures flowed past us. No Mind watched.
First Light
No god, no soul, no spirit, no beyond.
No other life, no hell, eternity.
No sin, no fall, no grace, no redemption.
No dim confessional.
No ought, no outer meaning.
No given, man
No free-will, no direction.
No destiny but form and breath and choice,
the endless view scaling out in distance.
No victim and no eden, wheel or eye.
No rebirth, and no snake coiled in the dark,
head flattened against being.
No call to us, no cry.
The sky
like the first white of sky in the first dawn.
Winter,Night,or Both
Intrudes into the eye a coldness that outlasts
of unrelated magnitude's coincident glare.
It is the glimmer of time, unstartled by humanity,
arriving at the human.
We watch ourselves, while Nothing else watches.
Form in the unplanned world is the sound that air makes
to our ear, without sense of beginning, unfilled
with our absence, carrying no message but origin.
Nocturne
The moth on the leaf of night,
makes something of the minuteness of the real.
It flutters and is fluttered by the mind.
Galaxy and eye are fluttered.
Moth climbs, through falling light,
through the white gravity of how things are.
Ex Nihil
We are Mind and no mind made us
in the pale dawn of deserts
spirits softly moving
the slow human commerce
the freight of earth-seas.
Mind learns a complex waiting
of snowed trees in winter
the cold of ice boughs
that have been there colder
in the stand of night
and holding out for a light
glittering with thaw not snowfall
Mind waits. Are we waiting
for more than our survival
among leaves also waiting ?
We are Mind and no mind made us
out of the nothing beyond us
or the nothing inside us.