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Lost In the Mists, Part V and Vi

Lost in the Mists, Part V and VI
                                  V.
Time was ,when reason was not our king 
Grey just the color of the morning mist.
We beat our drums and danced 
About our fires, warding off the pressing dark.
We danced and offered ourselves
To this world that bore us,
The cries in our hearts
Bright shapes of our dreams
Not for any reward
Nor to pay any debts
Nor even to save ourselves from the many nameless Terrors,
Those Terrors that breathed at our backs
In the dark.
Not even for this did we dance, without reason -
We did so because we felt it was right.

But now we are grown,
Earth's last children have grown,
And enslaved their Mother.
She is old and strong and will survive us,
But will she ever call to us again,
As she did in the time Before,
When feeling ruled, not reason?

She will, I think, if we look with mute appeal
Into the silent center
Into the dark still spaces
Where answers quietly await
With no words to diminish them.
The greatest questions have the simplest answers,
But those answers are not expressed in words.

She will reclaim her children.
When they reclaim their spirit.
When they listen again to voices in the rain
When they accept the greyness of their thoughts
When they realize they were not made to know
The inner heart of everything
Though born to search for it anyway.
In their reaching after Truth,
They will find their true value as living beings,
They will hear the breath of the Ghost in the Machine.

                                         VI

Each day we wake a little changed from before
But the force that rests unmoving
At the center of our troubled souls
Remains, as ever, the same.

In the end, we must love one another,
This, for our kind, must become the final, our only sacrament
We offer for Salvation from ourselves.
Love, such as we feel for our children,
For its own sake, no other.
We must come to grasp this,
Or be content to perish.

Meantime the world awaits the outcome 
Of our slow deliberations,
And turns and turns,
Biding time, progressing as ever
In its unending fermentation of its dead,
The constant transfiguration of form to new form,
Biding its time and awaiting our thoughts' fruition,

To be alive is to be bound by desires
To be aware is to be confused
As to how to attain them
To be human is to embrace the uncertain

To stare into these endless fields of grey,
To try to discern the shapes
The substance and structure,
Laying the foundations of our dreams.

So we look into ourselves reflectively;
Sometimes we see all the parts of our souls,
Those that lay closest to the naked Truth
Immersed in a mist of that shade not hopeless, but somber,
Floating part by disjointed part,
Drifting in fragmentary associations
Suspended in the rainsky color,
The color of doubt.

In the end, all will be well.
If in the end we learn to listen,
To voices in the rain, the sighings of the wind,
To the language the Earth speaks to her children,
Tones, vague and soothing, that address the spirit.
The susurrus of life through its decay and generation,
The balance daylight and nightdark on the edge of space.
When we listen like children to our Mother's song -
All will be well, deep down in the mist around us.

Copyright © William Masonis | Year Posted 2020

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