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.