The Dark Night and Dawning of the Soul

1. Friendship lost 

 

...A personal apocalypse explodes 

in cheerless days that wait and wait for a new year to start. 

I curl in winter’s cave, craving an end. 

•  

Pain of lost friendship burns, melts, a molten shard  

sinks through layers of heart which beats, hammers, forges perhaps 

a future blade: may I use this one more kindly. 

•  

What was it I did? Or did not do? 

Said, or omitted to say? Whatever was done, not done, 

how could it deserve such rejection? 

•  

Days and days and days, the march of days goes on; 

another year begins as minutes drag while decades disappear 

and time grows strange. 

•  

Grey sky, brown trees, black soil. From its cracks  

appear celandines, snowdrops, virginal 

white and gold from the dark, holy earth. 

•  

A crowd of crows shocked out of its tree 

by some unknown calamity 

wheels round the leafless canopy, 

black flags flapping in a winter sky, 

in mockery or lament they cry: 

‘Your friend is gone, a friend no more is she.’ 

•  

How strangely hard it is to face the Self: 

a pain so close, right at the core, I feel I’d rather die. 

No wonder we all duck and dive, deny,  

get high, gamble, cheat and lie, 

do anything but look at who I could have been 

and who I can become...

                              ...

 

...And now I do not know her anymore;

I wish her well. That is, I wish that she may find herself,

her true and noble self, the one I knew.

•      

Attachment is the spirit’s refuge

from the hurt of separation from its true home; a scab

on the wound that weeps and bleeds for ever.

•      

Write, write – it is some form of comfort and

distraction from the nearing, fatal edge to which I drift.

Step back, my heart, turn round, be still, say Yes.

•      

Self-hatred is sin as much as self-love.

Do not fall into the one nor float into the other;

gently sway, side to side, slowly forward.

•      

If a single goldcrest, bright crown flashing

in the yew tree’s gloom, can light me up,

then what could earth’s primal force,

vast beyond imagining, arouse in me?

  

...I have come to see how unpleasant I am: 

self-serving, inauthentic, codependent-creepy, and proud. 

He came with you this far; now he must go. 

•  

It collapses, all I thought I was 

and what remains is space, an open invitation: Come! 

I strain to turn, to change, to open out... 

•  

The boulder damming the stream is I. 

I turn, I move, I long, I pray that I can roll this thing away: 

it is a mountain I, with You, can shift. 

•   

Now nothing’s left within that’s any good; 

even would-be selflessness turns out to be self-serving. 

A life built around self; self built on sand. 

•  

A lifetime serving others, so I thought; 

now I turn, like Plato in his cave, and see anew: 

in fact the others were all serving me. 

•    

Then God appears, not like a saviour but 

adversary. I fight, I fly, freeze and fawn before 

I hold the demon tight and, like Jacob with his angel, 

embrace my friend. 

•   

Now I let it in, all I have created. 

It will be straightened out, this tortuous, twisted Gordian knot. 

I will be wrenched, torn, cleaved; will be unwound. 

•  

I asked for a sign and soon comes your message, 

supporting, kind, just being there, saying ‘Keep going’. 

And though nothing has changed, I weep with relief. 

•  

Before I phone you, I open my heart. 

I’ve been taught I can do this at will – step back, let go – 

and it beats so warm, a march of gongs and cymbals. 

•  

A firebird, love pursues and drives me  

with burning wings toward the edge;  

I turn, she embraces me and shows me

the insubstantial nature of my love.  

A flaming dove, love flies with me, all peace. 

•  

Your admonishment, gentle reproach,  

is no reproach, for you are my human angel on earth: 

wise mind, great heart, kind spirit. Although I fail, 

I try to be near you with all my caring powers,  

for you are no angel but human being, 

hurting and needing the healing closeness of friendship 

which I, the only I that I have, can give. 

 

3. I am, is an empty space 

 

...Same old face and hair, eyes and nose and chin, 

waistline bulging, arms too thin, ragged fingernails, creased skin, 

but everything is different within.

•  

Can people change or do they stay the same? 

It must be possible if there’s meaning in this life. 

The question’s answered when I start to be. 

•  

Be the change I crave. 

Want a friend? Be a friend. 

Seek meaning? Be the meaning. 

Love? I am that love. 

•  

Do not ask, Who is my friend? but be one. 

Do not ask, Who loves me? Love yourself then love some more. 

Who am I to speak of love? I am love. 

•  

Stepping off the edge, there is no fall 

and crash, as feared, nor high euphoric flight; instead I hang 

above the void, buoyed up by others’ love. 

•  

The bud of the future waits on the twig 

of the present, borne by the bough of the past. Imagine 

what you would die for, and you will unfold. 

•  

Moving beyond feeling good, feeling bad, 

one side illusion, deception the other,  

between light-tempter Lucifer and Satan soul-killer; 

powerless power holds the balance. 

•  

Do not love your self-regarding self 

but love the other self, the one you push away. 

Let me not float in illusion, thinking I’m better,  

nor drown in deception, fearing I’m worse, 

but keep my feet firm on the ground of the heart...

 

                              ...

 

...Alone, I cannot bear the pain – I turn,  

resist or run. But in the twistings of the fight 

and on the further side of death: there You are. 

•  

My self is so much bigger than I am. 

I call it angel, muse, ancestors. In the quantum world 

the seen and unseen mingle: we are one. 

•  

Fiery, watery, aery muses  

batter my doors, or patiently wait;  

it is I who resist, prevaricate. 

•  

Habits of invulnerability 

are hard to break: demolish walls, welcome the attackers: 

after all, they love you enough to lay siege. 

•  

On the table in the chamber of the heart, 

lay these tender lambs and doves – fluttering 

intentions, bleating thoughts – see sweet smoke  

of offering rise; may holy lightning strike –  

the fire of thy will igniting mine. 

 

4. Fire takes hold 

 

Joy of libido, it is my power – 

eagerness, longing, inordinate passion, carnal desire.

Lust – its root in the old word leubh, to love.

•  

Molten energy, balls of fire, magma 

boiling up from the core, earth’s life-force bursts into being: 

To be! just joy to be in the world. 

•  

Not for me but you, great You who contain 

all yous—my sisters, brothers, children, friends

—I shine for you. Take this shade from my light. 

•  

Like a salmon, pure muscle, drilling upstream,  

breaks sometimes the surface of pleasure, leaps in ecstasy, 

so I drive on and up, inexorably. 

•  

Is it only hurting breaks me open? 

Would I otherwise stay sealed, a seed shut in its case, 

stillborn, an unfulfilled intention? 

•  

Sex is a spiritual superpower, 

a daily imperative pounding below. 

Can I marry it to my heart’s desire? 

•  

A mouse in so many situations – 

not standing up, speaking out, speaking truly –  

caught in his own trap, neck snapped, eyes bulging, 

prostrated, poor mouse, emasculated. 

•  

It was always there, shamed and suppressed, 

now released, welcomed at last. Who would have thought the old man  

had so much blood and power left in him? 

•  

How to contain and direct this new force?  

Stay steady in fire and flood as you did in emptiness. 

Hold. Wait. Welcome desire; do your duty...

 

                        ...

 

...Twin fires burn: bright flame of the youthful self, 

and the hot, dark, heat of carnal desire: 

two faces of a priceless, red-hot coin. 

•  

Pain has receded and in the morning, 

washed-up on a strand, blue, grey and sand, I am appalled 

at my solitude, alone with this beauty. 

•  

Come move with me and be my love, and love 

yourself, become the person that you are and live, but really 

live your life, and we will God’s own pleasures prove. 

Fire takes hold, the furnace a creature, 

crouching tigress, no longer hidden, ignored and denied, 

but potent, armed, awaiting direction. 

•  

The force within is a ravening beast 

that rapes, if I let it, controls, takes gratification  

– or taken in hand, an ox to harness. 

•  

Holy beast, I embrace you, saddle you: 

open the gates! blow trumpets! you and I are riding out 

to join the vanguard, proclaim the future. 

   

5. I dreamed that I was capable of love 

 

Too much introspection, teachers suggest,  

is the road to hell. They do not add: If you don’t go there 

you never return, fitter for living. 

•  

From Elysian fields of night, the way 

lies across the abyss of fear, through valleys of grief,  

back to the Earth, blue planet of love. 

•  

Good morning fear, again I wake beside you. 

But now your very presence tells me we are  

in the only place where we can work together. 

•  

From the wells of night, the water of life 

enters this world, pouring through the place that hurts, 

the wound that opens at my centre...

 

                             ...

 

...And yet another dawn reveals the place 

I used to be; the river moves, the wound still aches. 

After all the transformation, I’m the same. 

 

And so I arrive, the poet says,  

back where I started, knowing myself anew, 

and knowing too, it never ends. 

 

I will not cease from exploration 

arriving always back where I started, 

knowing the place for the first time, knowing 

as long as I live on this earth I am well 

until the season turns – the constriction  

of the bud, the agony of its breaking,  

brief summer of breathing and blossoming,  

before the long ages of dying 

and the great sea-change, sky-change, the trial  

of another birth, dawn follows dawn. 

 

I wish I could comfort you, celebrate 

the end of the tale, the royal wedding, 

but marriage is always only a start, 

and I am not story-teller but only the fool 

who stumbles his way through the magic wood. 

I wish I could finish with roses  

and crowns of fire, but I am not finished. 

 

I cannot comfort, only accompany 

as we go separately, together. 

I wave and salute you, solitary sister; 

next time we return perhaps I’ll have learned 

to know and love both you and I better.