PLANET HEART

PLANET HEART

Without your power of warmth and light
All would be ever icy night;
And thousands of millions of human eyes,
Through all our time, have seen you rise;
O earth-revivifying, light-endowing one.
O master of our sky, life-rousing sun,
Once you are out upon day's round,
For us, all other stars are drowned
Within your splendour. Fire-heart,
Your children worlds are bound in worship

O light-abounding power, vision-spinning,
Your dawn is our eternal re-beginning;
The sky's vast blue, all colours of the earth,
And even sight itself, all come to birth
From your unending, swift, proud-shining shower;
All earth's green plants grow up upon your power,
All browsing beasts devour your leaf-caught glow.
Our minds have flowered from looking on your show.
And when eye-astounding face sinks down,
The moon is still your pale and mottled mirror.

Your power the weave of swirling winds, the ocean
You right-endow with precious gift of motion;
Bird chorus greets your dawn with rousing sound;
Toward you each flower unfolds devotion, even
The grass blades bow to trace your path in heaven.
Earth's water veins you power and purify
By calling rain-bestowing clouds on high;
You heat the humus life, the python, trout,
And butterfly draw inner warmth from you.

We follow your onward spiral through star vastness,
As you ray light and heat upon the darkness;
You pour your ceaseless power and blessing down
On earth's miraculous and living gown;
Oh, ever-giving, powerful planet heart,
Our hearts are still surrounded by the dark,
And after all, when all is said and done,
We are all one, still offspring of the sun,
If only we were faithful like the sun,
Endowing all of life with warmth and light.

TO THE RED STAR

TO THE RED STAR

Once I gazed into the darkened vastness,
Seeing you, flame-reddish star,
A blazing point, out-streaming strength,
And radiating gleaming light,
And gleaming radiating might.

You’re just a smaller arid world to us,
With pinkish sky and rust-red rock and dust;
But once you were seen as the sacred source
Of war and strength and striving force.
You claimed the blaze of active red, bright hue,
And iron your metal: tough, flame-tempered, true.
It flows in our red veins, forever ferrying
Life’s strength of oxygen to brain and limb.

Oh Aries, wargod, in this sad but clever age
We’ve shattered myth’s great mirror, yet fatal rage
Has blindly shaped such power as you portrayed.

For steel and iron, moulded to a million objects, made
Man’s making substance, with swift bullet, stabbing blade,
And blazing shell and blasting cannon’s flame,
Have torn this human age with grief and pain.

Yet you could still be thought of as
A helping paradigm, in this:
That strength is of the structure of creation,
Supporting all in All in wise relation.

For measure of your stellar wanderings first brought
The vision of the ways of worlds to Kepler’s thought:
The pulse of living ellipses that run
In harmony about a single sun-
No dead perfection of unaltered pace,
In static circles of unchanging space,
That ancient intellects had wished to trace;
But rather gaining stable power by
Dynamic sweeps of motion through the sky;
No rigid, epicycled, clockwork show,
But splendid, balanced, rhythmic flow.

Once I gazed into the darkened vastness,
Seeing you, flame-reddish star,
A blazing point, out-streaming strength:
And radiating gleaming light,
And gleaming radiating might.

TO THE EYE OF NIGHT

TO THE EYE OF NIGHT

While watching you rise,
white disc in a dark sky,
I wondered at my solemn mood,
timeless moon.

Quietly, quietly you will climb
height of night to spread your shine-
ever cyclic one,
only sky-world lighting earth,
other than the day-bright sun.

Why do you appear as if
spying on the life beneath?

What are you now sighting from afar,
gliding over silent cities,
flying over silver fields,
prying through the mountain's mask
high on violet, huddled hills,
lighting wave-white sparkle,
spying through the silent forest,
riding over quiet plains,
enshrining all in wide, white light,
oh, ever changing eye of night?

Is it to shine upon,
now glare of daylight guise has gone,
a deep-disguised, a finer earth?

Is it to find
an arcane, unsuspected wanderer,
wise behind each wakeful mind?

January Song

JANUARY SONG

The rain arrived, the grass is high,
Green armies raising overnight
Their spears to eat the sun and seed
And conquer all the space around.

The sky is cloud-patched and the air
Sits heavy with day’s humid heat
And stillness brings a visitation
Of flies upon their summer wings.

The pheasant coucal’s mating call
Whoop-whoops through drifting afternoon
With faintest smell of maybe rain-
Then all around cicadas drum.

The god with his two faces looks
To past and future standing now-
The Janus of the month whose mind
Would gaze through these warm-dreaming days.

The new year dawns in summer heat
With holidays’ up-springing green.
My mind is not so god-like keen
And struggles with my purposes.

Still days shall rise. I try to set
Some course for future hours to be
And once more trim that frail craft hope
To sail upon that endless sea.