Earth’s Face

 

Early dawned the poverty of human love

Upon his passive, searching soul.

Early shed the shackles that bind us

To the doleful pursuits of emptiness called life.

The awakening call came, noiselessly,

And the Way effortlessly opened,

Like a flower to the sun.

 

Peace came trailing divine delight,

Cool winds of Grace unveiled the sacred Fire.

Nature’s front shimmered with the Presence,

A warm aspiring Light arranged his days

And sought for that which can resolve all things

That all things here on Earth may find their place.

 

But, unconvinced within that mental Knot remained;

Here was the work for which his life was made.

A half-seeing plateau was not his resting place,

The Fire fuelled a journey to a summit far beyond.

 

A seeming downward plunge began

With She the unknown captain of his march,

She led him up and on to greater heights

While he in abject fear resisted still.

 

Now gone the small spiritual gains

He clung to as an end, a goal.

Gone the sense divine in smallest acts

And child-like wonder at momentous things.

An inner struggle shut him to the Light

Through mind’s insidious chasmic intrusion.

 

All the retrograde emotion of the human lot arose

In all its cosmic strength and ugliness.

His days became a shell of hallow doing

Flawed by self important impotence.

Life’s barc founded on a reef of jagged doubt.

 

‘Dear God,’ he cried, in desperate wilfulness,

‘Release me from this awful winding path

Where all amounts to nothing when That departs,

When separated from the Inseparable!’

 

Her blow of Love responded swift and fierce

Upon his reckless being’s mind choked core.

It tore a link and a searing pain

Within his depths exposed a severed knot;

A crucial evolution’s anchor left its moor:

 

A wave-mass tumbling seeing

Broke upon his island being’s brow.

And in the glistening midst of morning hue

He saw, he saw Her Face, Her Figure

Outlined against a dark and stormy sky,

In the shadowy whirling movement of Time’s waves,

Upborn, immobile upon a mass of ocean being,

A single sentinel in Evolution’s onward surge.

She gazed out from a wave-crest, magnificently alone,

Her Face impeccably resolved in purpose and pursuit.

 

In that gaze he felt the future’s luminous ridge

Move near in tiny threads of interwoven light.

A hurried glance within revealed a steady glow:

That globe of Light installed and fixed

Marked out his being’s course from Time’s base.

This golden moment’s seeing crowned his days

And set his feet upon earth’s path again.

 

Aryaman

5.1.1991

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