THE SUMMIT

I gained the heady heights
And saw
The vast expanse of cosmic blue
Below.

I had not seen
All this before,
Had not been here
Did not come or go,
Never was above the Law

The past had gone,
Dissolved …
And now I stood
Outside of time
Beyond the polar grip of right or wrong
Untrammeled by the meaning of belong.

The karmic wheel
Turned round me
As I stood within the circle centre,
Safe within
The heartbeat of the Absolute.

Don’t expect a thunderclap
Or deluge
Of torrential rain.
You’ll only hear your own voice
Saying quietly

I came …

Bruce Cooper, September 1991

The Divine Image

To Mercy Pity Peace and Love,
All pray in their distress:
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.

For Mercy Pity Peace and Love,
Is God our father dear:
And Mercy Pity Peace and Love,
Is Man his child and care.

For Mercy has a human heart
Pity, a human face:
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.

Then every man of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine
Love Mercy Pity Peace.

And all must love the human form,
In heathen, turk or jew,
Where Mercy, Love and Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.

William Blake 1757-1827

Byzantium

The unpurged images of day recede;
The Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed;
Night resonance recedes, night walkers’ song
After great cathedral gong;
A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is,
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.

Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades’ bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the winding path;
A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail the superhuman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,
More miracle than bird or handiwork,
Planted on the star-lit golden bough,
Can like the cocks of Hades crow,
Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud
In glory of changeless metal
Common bird or petal
And all complexities of mire or blood.

At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit
Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.

Astraddle on the dolphin’s mire and blood,
Spirit after Spirit! The smithies break the flood.
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

William Butler Yeats

 

Ode on a Grecian Urn

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And happy melodist, unwearièd,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul, to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

O Attic shape! fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

John Keats

The good-morrow

I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I
Did, till we loved? were we not wean’d till then?
But suck’d on countrey pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the seaven sleepers den?
T’was so; But this, all pleasures fancies bee.
If any beauty I did see,
Which I desir’d and got, t’was but a dreame of thee.

And now good morrow to our waking soules,
Which watch not one another out of feare;
For love, all love of other sights controules,
An makes one little roome, an every where.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let Maps to other, worlds on worlds have showne,
Let us possesse one world, each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appeares,
And true plaine hearts doe in the faces rest,
Where can we finde two better hemispheares
Without sharpe North, without declining West?
What ever dyes, was not mixed equally;
If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike, that none doe slacken, none can die.

John Donne

ISIS

Blood-red flowers
On the shrine
Emit the fragrant eglantine,
Grape-like taste of good red wine
These blood-red flowers on the shrine.

The Cosmic Blood
That beats within
The scarlet veins of your pure skin
Is blood-red too and free from sin,
The Cosmic Blood that beats within.

And I have blood
That colour too
And you are me and I am you,
It isn’t easy too construe
The blood in me that flows in you.

Oh, kill the mind
That separates
And open now elusive gates
To free me from the heavy chains
So I can flow through your pure veins.

Bruce Cooper 1990

Fondly Finally Goodbye

“And indeed there will be time
To wonder, ‘do I dare’ and, ‘do I dare?’
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair –”       TS Eliot    

Almost fifty-seven …

The limbs begin to stiffen

And the sun, now past its zenith,
Sinks reluctantly below the Western sky
And down the road,
A long way off,
A youth waves fondly, finally,
Goodbye.

Quickly now the wind
Stirs in the trees,
Lifts itself above a breeze
And quietly begins to moan.

I feel a chill within the bone.

Somewhat nearer than the boy
A hoary figure comes
Munching its blue gums
To reveal
An almost fiendish smile.

I stay awhile and watch it click its jaws …

Then I turn my back upon the boy
And go indoors.

Bruce Cooper
August 2002

 

     

Eternity

Before the day winds
back again
I sit,
between the dark and light
entranced by images
of night
that float around within
without,
transfixed by what
life’s all about.

The answers seem so close
they can be touched,
and yet destroyed,
if clutched,
as if the seeking dissipates the end,
as if
the mind waits patiently to bend
towards
what it
already knows:
that seeking always flows
and answers always tend.

The night brings focus
to a process
that the seeking doesn’t end
but returns to its beginning
and begins yet once again,
while a snake
lies
in a circle
under lucid drops of rain.

Bruce Cooper

Song.

Sweetest luve, I do not goe,
For wearinesse of thee,
Nor in hope the world can show
A fitter Love for me;
But since that I
Must dye at last, ’tis best,
To use myself in jest
Thus by fain’d deaths to dye;

Yesternight the Sunne went hence,
And yet is here to day,
He hath no desire nor sense,
Nor halfe so short a way:
Then feare not mee,
But beleeve that I shall make
Speedier journeyes, since I take
More wings and spurres then hee.

O how feeble is mans power,
That if good fortune fall,
Cannot adde another houre,
Nor a lost houre recall!
But come bad chance,
And wee joyne to’it our strength,
And wee teach it art and length,
It selfe o’r us to advance.

When thou sigh’st, thou sigh’st not winde,
But sigh’st my soule away,
When thou weep’st, unkindly kinde,
My lifes blood doth decay.
It cannot bee
That thou lov’st mee, as thou say’st,
If in thine my life thou waste,
Thou art the best of mee.

Let not thy divining heart
Forethinke me any ill,
Destiny may take thy part,
And may thy feares fulfill;
But thinke that wee
Are but turn’d aside to sleepe;
They who one another keepe
Alive, ne’r parted bee.

John Donne