I read twenty to thirty books at a time, piecemeal, like short visits to important people I wouldn’t want to bother with my insignificance. These days I’m stricken with attention deficit disorder beneath which flows a stream of consciousness confluenced to a sure mystery. That’s where I have come to rest at this age. Stars […]
Tag Archives: descent
Autumn is burning, turning, all green grown is suddenly fire, lit from within in the fading dusk. The vital hue descending, to the root and rhizome we all go, to our essential darkness, but not before our luminous colors reveal the passing of our substance, our quest, our earnest effort at some small good and […]
“In the respects in which the soul is unlike God, it is also unlike itself.” St. Bernard You were born a poet, slow to affiliations otherwise. You do not belong but to elements and instincts, just the basics, in a place, embodied, of a home and a small handful of people. You were familied, churched, […]
The unhusked seed will never live because it will not die.
There is a hawk within me that oft must kill to live. What part of God is this? While the status of the human as prime and proper predator is self evident, I cannot help but fret upon the question of the kill itself. Am I the dainty savage with her pinky raised while pecking […]
O, for faith beneath all faiths. Each of us will live a chosen way and die somewhere in the descent of it. We, the unbound into consciousness know that we are here, resonant inward, shining outward, some notion of substance, some foreknowledge of destiny. Sooner should we feel that everything belongs and ours is not […]
The old voice summons in a chorus of redwings. I walk out beyond the bulwark where I am known not by names but by substance. There is a spirit in the world that is causing me to see my darker iniquities. A better prayer would often be Dear Lord, forgive me for what I once […]
The day dies young in winter, into the dusky cold… o go inside it says, make fire! I am declining, remaining, out beneath the indigo. In this descending, thoughts and moods laid low, as waiting, as dormant, the silent length of nearing night is hard, a rasp on the cheek, a bite on the ear, but […]
The willow tree is dying, and I, so of myself, would ask what I might do to save it. As if a tree should not be seen as glory laid so low in western winds, so slow to loosen at the root, opening to the sky, returning to the earth. The host of shade and […]
If ours alone to chart a course unto the stars. If but a day to seize a breath of sunlit air. If mere a touch of earthly flame where flesh was heartened innocent, to give the fruit of loin and womb as gift to world with no return, still, there is love. If toil adorned […]
James Scott Smith 