Energy

 

"Energy is eternal delight" ~William Blake

If your revolution does not begin by drowning in the ocean of delight, who will you liberate, and from what?

If your neurons are not rivers of flame springing from wounds of delight, what use is thinking and believing?

If your heart is not a tavern where chalices of wonder pour stars and planets back and forth to bring out their delightful bouquet, what teachings can you offer?

You claim that sorrow makes you wise, but does your shadow not consist of pulverized suns, infinitesimal charmed quarks of joy?

Do not speak until every particle of your tongue is Shivananda-Lahari, a wave of Shiva-bliss.

Don't march for Peace or pontificate for Justice until your steps leave no footprints as you dance with a furious delight that granulates the rosary of your bones, churns your tears into the buttery spawn of rainbows, glitters your body in the hopeless bling of midnight, for love is never in the future. Love is the flowering of Presence, where there is no need for hope.

Listen friend: death-welcoming soil, dank fallen leaves, opening petals of camellia in December, elegant downy mold that blossoms on the compost heap, a mother's teardrop, the hard-bitten nipple in the baby's lips, the scales of useless memory crusting the eyes of the dying, the stained yellow remnants taken out to be burned, the hollow of a mouth about to say farewell, but cannot, the buried seed that dreams green wings flying up through the loam to touch a golden ray, yet waits, and dreams in darkness...

These are all a fantasy of dust, of very dust, kneaded and risen and twice-born, yeasted with your breath, gifted with your grace, every mote of your body a tremor of eternal delight.



Listen to a reading of this prose-poem HERE.
Engraving by William Blake.