Tourmaline and Amythest

                                        

                                     Don Hynes

                                                 Going down with autumn,
                                                 following the rain
                                                 along the bedrock
                                                 to deep river roots,
                                                 the fault line of ages past
                                                 marks the way to inner earth,
                                                 dark caverns of crystal
                                                 where heartbeat and breathing
                                                 slow to rest, to learn
                                                 the old magic of winter.
                                                 Here darkness teaches
                                                 to see where there is no light,
                                                 where water rises from stone
                                                 and the wisdom of silence
                                                 hangs in the cool damp air.
                                                 In tourmaline and amethyst,
                                                 obsidian and malachite
                                                 the ancient world
                                                 holds the knowledge
                                                 of what has been
                                                 and may yet be
                                                 for the days when the earth
                                                 will once again open.

                                         

                                                           donhynes.com/blog

The  Angelic  Proclamation

How shall man in this day restored be?

Let it be by the Word of God.

Let it be by His kingdom, by His power, to His glory.

Let no human desire remain.

Let no human doctrine be kept, or belief sustained.

Let all human religions and temporal systems

pass from the earth,

leaving only God revealed in man restored.

This is the Word of God spoken this day

by His angels in agreement on earth:

Glory to God in the highest!

Martin Cecil

This  Compost  —  Walt  Whitman

             

          

Something startles me where I thought I was safest,

I withdraw from the still woods I loved,

I will not go now on the pastures to walk,

I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea,

I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.

O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?

How can you be alive you growths of spring?

How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?

Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?

Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?

Where have you disposed of their carcasses?

Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?

Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?

I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv’d,

I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath,

I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.

Behold this compost! behold it well!

Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—yet behold!

The grass of spring covers the prairies,

The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,

The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,

The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,

The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,

The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,

The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on their nests,

The young of poultry break through the hatch’d eggs,

The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare,

Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato’s dark green leaves,

Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the dooryards,

The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.

What chemistry!

That the winds are really not infectious,

That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which is so amorous after me,

That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues,

That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it,

That all is clean forever and forever,

That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,

That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy,

That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, 

   that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will none of them poison me,

That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,

Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease.

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,

It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,

It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,

It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,

It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,

It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.