Words are holy.
Words are life-giving grain
gleaned from the stubble-crowned
sediment of human culture
by the poor of spirit.
To these alone they whisper their secrets
since in poverty’s bare cupboard –
the empty belly of the hunger for transcendence –
there is room for truth.
Words exist as spirit, disembodied
in the mind – that sea whose only shore
is eternity’s unreachable horizon –
or incarnate – gracing the white purity
of the printed page with innate wisdom.
Each word is an angel –
the messenger is the message –
it impregnates, or it heals,
it delights and amazes,
it enchants or seduces.
It can unleash the power to kill
that which rears up in selfish pride.
To those whose hubristic confusion
the gods would destroy
they first utter the word.
A rose is a rose is a rose
and every rose has a history
going back to the beginning,
which was the Word.
And every rose is complex
in its phylogeny and its structure,
in its powdery intercourse with bees
and breezes, in its love affair
with our star and the rains
he conjures up out of sea and rooted soil.
And each word is more manifold than the rose.
Every poet is a prophet
of the word. And every word
he reads, every word she writes,
has the potential to become
the gravitational nucleus of a poem,
with a lineage ancient as time before time.
A word is a soul, shape-shifter, eternal.
Rob Dakin © 2011