Notes About The Poem
An awfully long one, continued in Part V, which finishes it, I promise.Hard to classify, but I think ite's basically mystiucal.
Lost In the Mists, Parts I-Iv
Lost In the Mists Parts I - IV
I.
I ask these things, not understanding
Accepting
The ephemera of answers:
How is it we come to be together
In this place and time?
Again: Whence came this world, with its teeming billions,
Hung together with threads of love, hope and fear
How we exist as a multitude of strangers,
Few reaching for any deeper understanding
Beyond the casual nod, the indifferent glance.
For this there is no answer,
For when I look for one through the doorway of my mind,
I see only fields of grey.
Grey, the rainsky color,
Nor black nor white
A muddled marriage of light and dark;
The blurring color,
The color of doubt.
Many things are grey
Grey is many things:
Grey the time between sleeping and waking,
Grey the long hours of lonely lives
Morality a grey word,
For grey is always uncertain,
Down the long channels of cherished belief
Run currents of grey,
The color of doubt.
II.
Today's good action is tomorrow's crime
What we save today will be cast away later
And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,
Down through the unknowable chain of future days
The right things to do will shift with the flux and flow;
The only constant will be change.
Those who question move through life
With an unsteady grace,
Their inward visions ponderous,
Deeds slow of execution.
Caution is their foundation;
Resting on a sea of sand
The rainsky color the shade of their thoughts.
III.
Temerity is part of the human way
We dominate what we can,
Deride the rest
The heart speaks in terms the tongue cannot translate,
Suggesting our worst is yet a part of our best,
That ashen taste behind the use of our small powers
Tempers the pride of our triumphant hours.
Beneath the greening of the summerwarmed earth
Corruption proceeds in its slow work,
Feeding the living on the fruits of its breakage
Of the form and substance of the dead.
The cold rain slanting down from leaden clouds
Softens, enlivens roots deep in the loam,
The desiccated pulp of yesterday's life -
Many voices softly speak
Through the pattering tears of the sky,
Many voices, not understood by the mind,
Not grasped by understanding,
But heard and interpreted in dark chambers
At the center of the soul;
Where the meanings of things old as this world
Quietly abide
Resting in the silent center
The fertile graveyard of our primal thoughts.
The rain speaks though the wall of grey
Addressing our pride
Mixing truths forgotten with truths shut out.
The rain speaks, saying, among other things,
What are these monuments of men, the work of a day?
The mountains the Earth brought forth,
In fevered fury, long, long ages ago
Have outlasted your whole race.
They are Her monuments, and yet
For all their strength and glory
I, the humble rain,
I have washed away whole chains of them;
for I persist, returning and returning,
An Age a moment to me.
We can watch our glories dissolve;
Stone upon stone, great edifices rise, crumble and fall again,
Forgotten, fractured, always replaced
By other stones upon stones
Which will decay in their turn.
Impermanence is the standard of human affairs,
The common complaint in which everyone shares.
Consider with me the few things which do last -
Thoughts and emotions need not fade with the past.
IV.
Grey may be somber, but need not be hopeless
In grey is our suspension
Between unclear alternatives
In grey we form our judgements
And divide what is from what may be.
Listen,listen,listen
To the tired sighing of the winds.
They announce the advance of the evening's shadows
And weigh and form their opinions (in what else?) grey.
At any time,on two sides of this globe,
Daylight and Nightdark are meeting
In perpetual sunset/sunrise 'round the rim of the world
They blend in indistinction,
Merging with starstrewn space;
The Nothing which contains all.
In our tiny time we have dared to define
The Nature and Simplicity of God
And tried to dissect the clockwork
It formed and set in motion
Forcing Order out of Chaos
Meaning from Madness
These things we have described and defined
And fought about, unto the death.
Advancing and rejecting theories
Running in wide circles back to where we began.
And through every cycle the result is the same;,
We drown our understanding in oceans of grey.
It seems that in the end God is just God,
A being Beyond and Above
Past the weak reach of new minds such as ours.
And the Ghost in the Machine whispers,
Telling tales not so hard to comprehend,
But we refuse to listen.
We are the watchers in the dim shadowland,
We the listeners for the voice of Truth.
We search for we know not what,
As we pick a few jewels along the way.
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