by Pam Crane
Love for the coal, the diamond and the tree;
Love for all eyes, for star, for meteor-swarm -
Glory be to God for all of Three.
Let there be life for every loving thing,
Life for the Light that out of Glory grew;
Life for the Harmony my soul can sing -
Glory be to God for all of Two.
Let there be Fire for every holy heart,
Fire understanding; Fire for duty done;
Fire for the rapture of God's rejoining part -
Glory be to God for All of One.
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ICHTHUS
Help me - oh help me endure.
One touch from your finger-tip, fierce glory,
Is enough!
All that is darkest in me rises to the surface
Of my soul,
That which is dross, impure
Is borne up on the tide of my lanced love
My Lord, my Jesus, for you take me whole
To make the hopeless holy.
You have harpooned your struggling fish, O Man-God,
Master of Seas!
It is your net I fear far more than your will's sword,
Unvanquished Jesus!
It is your net - the stifling shock of shoals hauled asunder,
Outpoured as silver at your wounded feet;
The terror and glory
Is my drop lost already in your ocean.
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1Fishing
( A Double Etheree )
On
grey-blue
Galilee
a soft mist lies
Our nets arc outward
Fishing is poor today
The wet mesh only lifts weed
And we have a living to make
Somehow. Andrew gasps, points to the prow -
There stands Jesus, who had not come with us.
“Cast to the other side,” he says. The mast
Swings as we haul water-heavy net
To starboard; we stagger righting
The boat, every rope tightens,
Each muscle taut, Peter
Staring at Jesus -
Then at the shoal -
Then Jesus
on the
Sea
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JESU, WE LIFT OUR LIGHT TO THEE
The child whose eyes are full of stars
That burn the hills of broken cars,
The man whose smile is like the sun,
whose only wealth is everyone -
Jesu, we lift our light to Thee
To glorify their poverty.
The girl as simple as the moon
robbed of her innocence too soon;
The mothers who are left to pray
For sons and husbands locked away -
Jesu, we lift our light to Thee
To shine in their captivity.
The bones upon the searing plain
Too weak to reach for milk or grain;
The hands that cry from fields of blood
Dying in debris, war, and mud -
Jesu, we lift our light to Thee
To guide us to Eternity.
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PRAYER
Give me my share of the power of the mountains
And my part of the trees’ prayer.
Give me the wind to quicken my feet
And the birds to sing to.
Let me remember roses
And that rainbows begin in cloud,
That the sky has wept oftener than I,
And that tears may sleep in the quiet kiss of the grass.
Give me the love of man,
And fill it with light
So that my heart is not weighed down with wings,
But make it the gay feather on which I fly.
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PSALM
Dear God, I touch the hem of your listening darkness
with my heart;
And my lips are filled with light.
Clambering on the vanishing treads of prayer,
Each thought's finger strains in outreach unto you;
And it is wholly there, Mind close in for the strong force
To fuse Mind Holy with lowlier mind;
As a fine bead breaks of dew, runs at a water's touch,
is lost in the pool.
As a passion of wind and wave claps cloud
and the soaring sea together
Rapt in the silent eye of the vortex.
O God, I am a moving stillness within you:
But touch my need with the finest filament of your Will,
Time is re-woven.
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THE COMING
When you first came - your clarion sounded by a thousand fables -
Nobody noticed you, hid in your own shadow,
Nobody saw the Man behind the winding-sheet
Who opened his arms wide and called to the children;
Who opened his arms wide with a lovely smile
And touched the amazing glass for all to see
In the bending light your face...bare Love breaks through a fissure of time
In which the heart, the Earth, and the Sun, stop.
And the second time,
You blew like pollen through a thousand hearts
Lighting the grains of love into a flare;
Striking like a match dry nerves, and in a running flame
Catching the hands of the unprepared, of the unwary,
Catching the hands of the dancers in delight
And running with their messages of love
All over the Universe.
We are astonishment, we whose wide eyes were burnt open;
Bursting like stars on the firmament of fear.
The third Coming comes in a blue silence. Those
Who have understood, bowing their melting eyes
To the Infinite as the liquid Love of the Will of the Father
Floods and flows over the last banks of our history,
Floods and flows white as our burning blood,
Yielding with utmost grace each heart to the Inconceivable
As gaunt brothers tower in fear over a brief terrain
And are taken, all, with the body of the world.
And are faced, all, by the eyes of Christ in the blue silence
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THE PILGRIM KING
Christ is your Creed, your high endeavour;
He that is Love let none deny.
You are the loved, without Him never -
In shadow and sunlight standing by.
Christ is your Truth, your God, your Saviour;
Ye are no wiser than His Word.
Dutiful be in all behaviour
Unto that Song the soul has heard.
No-one is lost; His dearest pleasure
Is ever to be our homeward Guide,
Gathering slowly all his treasure
Of human hearts to the Angels’ side.
Lord of our Joy, no tongue can praise you
More than the Christed soul can sing!
Beacon of Love in Heaven ablaze, You
Reign in our hearts as the Pilgrim King.
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WALKING ON THE WATERS
You walk among us, and we become
Incandescent. Who are You?
You are the Light of the world, our life's flame
Opening bone and nail to reality.
Our liquid lives run away from the last cry
Cross-hatched with pain, melting into Your feet
To bear You mutely as the waters bore You -
All we can do, to make this Death complete
Is haul our Tree down to the rising tide,
The debris-ridden sea we call a soul.
Back in the lovely desert of our lies
The weight of it seared us, old and black as coal.
Nothing behind us but the wastes of time,
/> Nothing before us but the Saviour's face,
Like mad men we float out on the Cross
To enter You. In the dirtiest, holiest place.
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THE VIRGIN WINDOW
A little child I do not know
With a stone broke my window.
The beautiful glass, all shattered and smashed
Lay on the floor where it had crashed,
Its jewelled colours alive no more -
In fragments dead upon the floor.
Mother Mary's gentle face
Was cracked and holed in many a place.
Her soft-draped cloak of heavenly blue
That glowed like love when the sun shone through
Was torn from the limbs of the Virgin Queen
And there was a hole where her heart had been.
The cruel stone lay there below.
I picked it up and with sorrow
Bluring my sight with tears unshed,
My mind numbed and my heart like lead,
Wearily over the glass I stepped,
Sat down on a chair, and wept.
(Written when I was thirteen.)
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NURSERY RHYME
Jesus Christ is ours today,
His Sun will shine on straight and gay!
Leave the trivial, leave the smart
And come to the Lover that’s in your heart.
Come with a whoop or come with the gall,
Come if you’re ill or you’re not at all.
Up the ladder where angels fall -
A Cup and Loaf will serve us all!
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BIG BANG
One day which never existed,
God
in solitary rage surprised Himself with a Thought
so unsustainable in the here-to-fore
He cracked the unflawed sheer shimmer
of Monad in Equilibrium,
He broke Mind
mirrored in all directions,
He shivered Infinity
and the incorporeal mighty Hand that held it,
thus beginning seven days of Bad Luck
as Time was born
in the vortex.
Being God,
Resourceful, He stretched forth His other hand
upon the vortex, with an opposite charge -
And Said: LET THERE BE LIGHT, and There Was Light
flashing from splinter to splinter, aeon to age;
suns of a shattered hand blinked fire into and out of a myriad million dizzy reflections
glinting Godhead back,
curled time-shards
reduplicating spin-drift, inkblot, starclot and coalsack -
by which light a God could see His scattered parts
And Being
God, He Said:
LET THEM FLY
Asunder upon the wind of
My unparalleled Imagination,
LET THEM SEED where a
plus-minus meets in the heart of light
a microcosmic god in the anti-mind, for this
is Matter of Moment; let there be Life, therefore,
so let there be Soul - let there be male, and female
warring and mating; let there be holes for light to penetrate,
dramatic poles, north and south in collision, upwards, down -
as in My excess I find
sorrow I cannot drown
in the necessity
for light to
mend Me by,
so will my Self,
enantiomorphic
twin of Me and
friend
be lover of that Light,
his flesh a bandage for My fractured dignity
for a seven-night.
Till then,
Let every action have its equal and opposite reaction.
Let there be
Polarity, pendulum, fractal, parabola
And parity.
Thus Spake God …
… One Day that suddenly existed, as
a myriad million fragments of Forever
took their first lesson in strife and alchemy;
towards which sex, war, succour, science and sainthood,
the long, vain struggle to tie the strings of symphonies
between grass and the galaxy, Caligula and Christ -
So many poles of puzzlement, poor man-thing! -
making itself slowly in God's other image,
feet on a star, head in the coalsack.
God forgot
to make men like snails. Here it is Sunday lunch
And still we have not mapped our route for the last afternoon
of our life; the future winks only briefly at us
out of the healing mirrors.
Some are struggling
To put their eyes out on stalks and see around corners
of the inconceivable before the last trump
is played, the last supper indigested and
the disbelievable unMichaelangelic Hand
reach forth to converge the silver trails
of the slow, vulnerable, visionary sun
housing the soul in helix.
Here they come,
a few at a time,
the unrejected cells;
a Miracle is made.
The Wound
closes.
Thy Hand, O God
may close the eyes of Time - but it is built of us!...
We who have put out the cat may be most unwilling to
put out the stars the cat and we have hunted our dreams by,
may be discontent;
may fidget with the smoothed fabric of Space,
finger the substance of the Maker's Dream,
flex the muscles of a new idea -
Spring a surprise.
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On Astrology
THE LATE, GREAT ...
Jeff, John and Ron -
All gone.
Mayo, Addey and Davison.
Charles Harvey and Charles Jayne;
Al H. Morrison.
The quiet teachers,
The mercurial out-reachers,
The wired-world explorers,
Sacrificing self for us.
Walker, Elliot, Woodruff
Achieved enough
And they are gone
To the real
With Jim, Howard, Neil -
Lewis, Sasportas and Michelson.
The men of presence,
The laid-back and the intense,
The spiritual mothers,
The many unforgotten others.
Rudhyar, Ruperti, Ebertin
Have now been
Where all is known
And Moby Dick is, Johndro, Maurice Wemyss
To whom we are dreams.
Ingrid Lind. Ada and Ivy. Margaret Hone.
Jacob, and Olivia, and Michel -
Schwartz and Barclay and Gauquelin -
Shine on where all is well
With our wise-women and our starmen.
Now we are the teachers,
We are the out-reachers;
They before, beside us, behind us
Invisibly remind us.
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THE PRICE OF FAME
You used to be my friend;
Such is the price of fame,
That partnership would end
Once you had made your name.
I found you at my door;
I taught you all I knew.
The glamour that you wore
An amusing part of you.
The showman and the mage
Reached for the wheels of time,
Spun them on every page,
Made them your pantomime.
Now here’s the photograph,
That weekend in July
When I made people laugh ...
You never said Goodbye.
And here’s the quarter-page,
<
br /> The store, the famous face;
And here’s the West End stage;
And Strictly in eighth place.
Here’s the remark you made,
Burned on a DVD,
The moment you betrayed
Your soul, to be rid of me:
The stars that lit your way,
All that I value dearly
You still exploit for pay
Yet were a hobby, merely.
Once, you always swore
Never to fail a friend,
And now one heart is sore
Which you refuse to mend.
If I am to forgive,
Leap from the turning wheel,
Abort its narrative ...
If we are both to heal,
Deep in the heart of light
My bitterness, my shame
Must die, and I rewrite
The price we pay for fame.
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Macrocosm in Microcosm …
23 Senryu on Astrological Technique
DRACONIC
Core values. The Sun
Counted from the Dragon's Head.
Trunk of an old tree.
Nodic arc - a fine
Anagram of Draconic.
And hears God ...!
TROPICAL
Character-building
Light streams from the Equinox
Nests, broken branches
SIDEREAL
The great scheme of things
One small world set in the stars
Tree in a landscape
DWAD
I behind the eye -
On the twelfth step of Being
Life enters and leaves
HELIOCENTRIC
Check for vital signs -
Faults glare, gifts shine in God's Eye
Hidden agendas
REFLEXES
Squaring the Circle
Warp and weft of painted Light
Flying your colours
Q CHARTS
My time - flying hands
Turn up the deal of the day.
You are my transit.
X CHARTS
Great expectations -
My riches under your Dragon