Poetry has been in my blood since I was a little child. My grandfather, Henry Craig, had memorized the whole of Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake and taught me the first couple of pages long before I went to school. My aunt, Ruth Craig, taught English at Oakwood School, near Poughkeepsie, and often read me poetry, particularly by Whittier. In school I occasionally wrote childish verse and when I was in 8th grade my teacher submitted one of my poems to a children’s magazine and, much to my surprise, it was published.
In college I majored in English Literature, largely because of my love of poetry. (I never did have the same appreciation for dramas or novels.) Thomas Traherne and 17th Century poetry in general became one of my great passions and I wrote a senior essay on Traherne’s poems. He was one of the major reasons why my doctoral dissertation was on the Cambridge Platonists.
Writing poetry is for me occasional and unplanned. All of a sudden words begin flowing through my mind and I try to capture them and put them in some order. Sometimes I am successful, sometimes not. In any event, over the past years I have written a substantial number of poems on a variety of subjects. Some of these have been published in a variety of journals but many more have seen the light of day in my own publications. Among these are:
Along the Silk Route
Matters of Life and Death
Dark Trees and Empty Sky, with many photographs
There are also many “dream poems” that literally came to me in a dream in a work called The Way of Adam by Adamah.
My most comprehensive collection, however, is to be found in The Voyage of Life. Here are a few of my poems as examples:
There is a Place
There is a place
Where the pavement ends
And the road turns rutted,
All grassy in between,
Then, a once used
Foot trail,
Easing mindlessly
Through the crags
And deep forest
Where the feral range;
And the alpine meadow,
But for the whir of dragonfly and bee,
Motionless and hushed;
Now narrowing
Through a gorge
Wide enough for
One pilgrim only.
Plodding on
To a destination
Unspecified by habit
Or even imagined
By the heart.
A solitary seeker
Going. . .no Where
Until, a day,
If destiny should prevail,
There, in a clearing,
Canopied by misty oaks,
The great Pool of Silence
Where nothing stirs.
Not even the cicada sings
And all matter,
Even this matter,
Dissolves
At last
Into the holy mystery.
Bodhidharma’s Wall
Sitting before the Wall
For what seemed
Kalpas and kalpas of eons,
Cramped, uncomfortable,
Suffering,
Sometimes glimpsing,
So it seemed,
A tiny hole
Through which
Endless light
Could pour,
Only to find
On second pondering
The eyes had deceived
The brain;
And the Wall remained,
Just as solid
And impenetrable
As ever.
Others witnessed
They had found some
Crevice,,
Some tiny crack
To brighten their own
Darkness---
A revelation
If you will---
But, mighty trying
Revealed
No light,
No holes in the Wall
Where they pointed.
Only the vast,
Impenetrable
Wall.
It is just like
Kissing
Your own lips
Some ancient said---
Enough to break
The neck
If tried
Seriously,
And then a question glowed,
Like a pearl
Found in an
Ugly oyster:
How is it that
We see the Wall
At all?
What light?
Where?
Inside or outside?
Inside or outside what?
What?
“Object is object because of the subject;
Subject is subject because of the object.”
And Wall is Wall because of the ?
Not this, not that;
Not this, not that
But arising
(or is it non-arising?) and
Walking
Right
Through
The
Wall
Gaté, Gaté, Paragaté ,Parasamgaté, Bodhi Svaha.
The Howl
They think I am tamed,
Even civilized,
Certainly harmless,
But sometimes,
In the dead of night,
It howls,
Cruelly and
Without restraint,
And I listen,
Fingering
The depths of darkness,
With fear
And longing.
Through the Mysterious Crevice
Through the mysterious crevice
In the ancient rock
The Tidal Bore surges,
Inundating the mind
And washing away
My words
Into the oceanic abyss;
Broken and apart,
Sinking with anguish,
They scream to me
Their inane nonsense,
Like so many
Whirling seagulls
In the twilight;
Can a poem be born,
Can the bard still sing,
When all the words have drowned?
VIII
The earth is still
With an unutterable stillness,
Transfixed, transmogrified
In the vast and vacant reaches
Of the galaxies of time.
The owl, born for dusky flight,
Perches unblinkingly
Upon the rim of the abyss,
Aware of nothing.
There are no voices
Upon this shore,
No voices at all;
The salt sea undulates
No pulse;
The breath is bated
Before the once
Thrice-dark cavern
On the palisades,
Streaming now with
A golden light
From the fiery core
And beckoning with ethereal fragrance:
The desert rose opens with the dawning.
Is this a death or a birth?
An ending or a beginning?
Rapt, like the raptors of
Celestial flight,
It can neither know nor care.