Meditations in Fast Times: 30. There is a time for building

Note to Readers: “Meditations in Fast Times” is a devotional writing experiment for the Season of Lent. Each day during the season, I am writing a poem as a meditation on, taking as my inspiration and intertextual basis, T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”, as well as incorporating the daily office, current events, and other readings—some the same as those Eliot used while composing his seminal work and others.

                30.

There is a time for building,
a time for collapse,
a time of reckoning,
a time for remembering,
a time of forgetting,
a time for forgiving
a time of returning;
all these times are the same time,
past, present and future,
all apparent in the blooming eglantine,
all apparent in the salt clinging to each blossom,
all apparent in everything awaiting its due season.

We rise, we fall, we crumble;
Our old wood burns quick, hot
cinders into ash; we return to earth
and the wind carries us, like seeds,
to every corner, every place—
we are the song on the wind
as sunlight fills the empty pool;
neither shadow, nor light,
but we are there, in due season.

We are in the running rivers,
we are in the waving grain,
we are in the slowness of trees,
in the speed of the hummingbird,
we are the cries, smiles, laughter and dance
that turn to mourning and remembrance,
we are silence and sound, which together are music,
we are the songs of sadness or rejoicing—
we are the time and seasons,
and we await our due,
our return.

We are quietness at rest,
if we could be content so to be.

We are the dream,
if we could be content so to be.

The house of mirth and the house of mourning
are one and the same dream;
the clinging salt does not harm the beauty of the rose,
and the rose does not rebuke the embrace of the salty spray—
they are content to be thrown together,
for it is grand to be;
being is the grandest dream of all.

© 2014 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Meditations in Fast Times: 14. grasping at words

                14.

grasping at words,
gasping at my inability to seize them,
this is the fevered dream from which one awakes
in the middle of any dark night.

meanings, musings and poetry taunt,
they clang in my ears noisily and haunt
the nocturnal halls
in those hours meant to sustain
and refresh.

true music is sensed
beyond the thicket of my confusion,
partially heard, felt in fragments
dropping like leaves from trees that overhang,
but these traces do not form and clarify into song,
at least, not into the song of my salvation. 

the best words are winged chariots;
they rise up into the night sky,
adhering to the planets and the stars;
after a time, they crumble with laughter,
falling gently as dust to earth,
where they walk together,
gathering flowers,
stopping to help the fallen child,
and inform the wisdom of birds.

my ungainly chariots are empty; 

all have been flung into the sea,
where they are swallowed up;
they sink to the depths like stones.

I cry out,
but only a hot wind is heard;
it blows like a curtain around me,
an isolating cloak of despair.

my thoughts manage to form a plea,
echoing through empty pathways,
pooling and circling downward
toward the fathomless drain:

please help me break through the silence that swallows me up!

please help me break through to life!

© 2014 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen