What is born this time of year.
The sky is freezing and bright – the stars are shattering. I am breathing in and shuddering at the sight of the manifestation of sleep and night and dark. The moon is high and silvery and shocking. Crisp. Like fresh cucumber slices. And ice.
The Time Before Death
Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think…and think…while you are alive.
What you call “salvation” belongs to the time before death.
If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?
The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten -
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life you will have the face of satisfied desire.
So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is, Believe in the Great Sound!
Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for, it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.
-Kabir
————
Sometimes I think there is little else to say that poetry cannot say it.
And at the same time, I think that I dump a lot of pretty words out there with little substance attached to them and become afraid that all I’m chewing on is a little sack of bones.
It’s the bone season. Rich and empty. Full and slack. I have nothing but a bunch of contradictions and poems. And an urgency. I try to remember that it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that does all the work.
Ali said,
November 7, 2007 at 3:18 pm
Yes! What a gorgeous poem. I’m sending this to a friend who recently wrote me a distraught email about feeling as though he’d put his real life on-hold until he could find financial security. An apartment in the City of Death is right.
Joanna said,
November 8, 2007 at 12:46 am
It *is* the bone season, isn’t it? I would do well to remember that. This post reminds me of an essay once read about solitary pagans. It said that our longing to connect is proof that the connection was there all along.
Hecate Demetersdatter said,
November 8, 2007 at 2:23 am
Furious Spinner has a great post up about Bone Mother.
Jonah said,
November 8, 2007 at 5:59 pm
This poem is eerily reminiscent of what I learned from a trip to the underworld last night.
“If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?”
I was given much the same sentiment.
Uplift « The Empty Path said,
November 8, 2007 at 8:15 pm
[...] Sutterfield Winn shared a powerful poem by the 15th century Indian poet Kabir on her Pagan Godspell site: The Time Before [...]
Thalia said,
November 9, 2007 at 3:11 am
And at the same time, I think that I dump a lot of pretty words out there with little substance attached to them and become afraid that all I’m chewing on is a little sack of bones.
Oh no, your words are very very powerful. Consistently, deeply, gorgeous and true.
Thalia said,
November 9, 2007 at 3:12 am
Oops, doesn’t like html quoting, does it. That first bit was your words, if that’s not clear.