Bahá’í World/Volume 14/Verse

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The Bahá’í World
Volume 14

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[Page 639]

H

VERSE

And all the Atoms cry aloud

I bear Him witness now Who by the light of suns beyond the suns beyond the sun with shrill pen

revealed renewal of the covenant of timelessness with time, proclaimed advent of splendor joy

alone can comprehend and the imperious evils of an age could not withstand and stars

and stones and seas acclaimed—His life its crystal image and magnetic field.

I bear Him witness now——mystery Whose major clues are the heart of man, the mystery of God:

Bahá’u’lláh: Logos, poet, cosmic hero, surgeon, architect of our hope of peace,

wronged, exiled One, chosen to endure what agonies of knowledge, what auroral dark

bestowals of truth vision power anguish for our f uture’s sake. “I was but a man

“like others, asleep upon My couch, when, 10, the breezes of the All-Glorious were wafted over Me. . .”

Called, as in dead of night a dreamer is roused to help the helpless flee a burning house.

I bear Him witness now: towards Him our history in its disastrous quest

for meaning is impelled. Robert Hayden

(From Words in the Mourning Time, October House, Inc. Reprinted by permission.)

Bahá’u’lláh in the Garden of Riḍván Agonies confirm His hour,

and swords like compass-needles turn toward His heart.

The midnight air is forested with presences that shelter Him and sheltering praise

The auroral darkness which is God and sing the word made flesh again in Him,

Eternal exile whose return epiphanies repeatedly foretell.

He watches in a borrowed garden, prays. And sleepers toss upon their armored beds,

Half—roused by golden knocking at the doors of consciousness. Energies like angels dance

Glorias of recognition. Within the rock the undiscovered suns release their light. Robert Hayden

(From Selected Poems, October House Inc., 1966. Reprinted by permission.)

“From the Corpse Woodpiles, from the Ashes”

From the corpse woodpiles, from the ashes and staring pits of Dachau, Buchenwald they come 0 David, Hirschel, Eva, cops and robbers with me once, their faces are like yours From J ohannesburg, from Seoul. Their struggles are all horizons. Their deaths encircle me.

Through target streets I run, in light part nightmare and part vision fleeing

What I cannot flee, and reach that cold cloacal cell where He, who is man beatified

And Godly mystery, lies chained, His pain our anguish and our anodyne. Robert Hayden

(From Selected Poems, October House Inc., 1966. Reprinted by permission.)

639

[Page 640]640 Today requires a Lace of Truths

Today requires a stronger lace than the Vienna cord with which Mrs. Walgreen blessed my birth in Chicago.

Our modern scene demands

(even of femininity) a cup

less fragile than the Copeland-Spode of my earlier desire.

It must be as harp-like in sound and form as the lace of steel that wings the Varrazzano bridge.

As eclectic as the lace that Truths form in the stone of the temple of Bahá’í,

as forever enduring in grace as the intermolding of the Benin Bronze. Margaret Danner

Desert Spring

You cannot see them so much as feel them Coming in crowds, never singly, coming Sudden, bursting color, thrusting blood-reds, Golds, pinks, on a landscape soon vibrant With the pristine singing of Spring,

Laid upon a sea of dunes.

Watch them bloom quickly, coming Sudden to the hidden self,

Spilling cocoons, gathering in groups, To share the blaze of freedom

After the long year,

The inward movement of the soil, The care of the single seed.

Now the moment deeply ancient, Now the meaning fully cosmic Explodes into being Revealing the kingdom of Abhá! Joan Imig Taylor

Pilgrimage

By a stone in that most holy place, Where the water runs and the white birds fly, The M ystery stands revealed. See! The abiding lake! How it trembles To hold reflected for an ecstatic moment A vision beyond time. Olive V. Applegate

THE BAHA

i WORLD The Return

Once more in warm silence, let us understand each other,

and into the stillness let a drum start beating.

Let us sing once again with the wonderful lifting Spirit

of the days when the prairies had no fences,

but were clean and beautiful for thousands of miles.

Let us ready ourselves for a great awakening,

for it is now the day. This is the time when the

Indian people will return to the Spirit.

This is the age when we must teach the world to love;

this is the day when our voices must be raised

at the council tables of the world.

As our Wise ones foretold, we lost our Spirit.

The way was dark and confusion blinded us.

The path of another people led us far from the old way

and from the wisdom we had known.

But this is the day of our return to the Spirit! Let us not fear, for there is a great new message from the East.

Let us search for this message and in it

find our greatness and our joy.

But let us beware lest we find a false message; let us study its meaning, let us make sure.

Let us turn to the inner light, dear people, and let us find warmth in its glow. Let us be swept up on the waves of glory to His nearness, to His knowledge. Ron Gordon Kilally, Saskatchewan

We are searching

Once on the prairies

of blue, rose and yellow,

my people sang their songs of glory to the Great One above.

They hunted and chased

and were all free together.

Their hearts held the rose of love.

Now it hurts to see them. Day by day

their hearts are broken; they are the lonely,

they are the sad,

and misery is all they have.

But we have been told

this sadness shall end,

that there would come One from out of the East

Who would ease our pain; He would come from the East and out over the West

[Page 641]VERSE 641

to plant the rose of love

within the garden of our hearts.

He would be a star of Beauty,

3 star of Light,

the star of Truth.

He would be as our Spirit

and we would find our greatness

in the light of the Beauty of the New Day, our happiness in this awakening Dawn. Yes, I believe that You are the return of the Spirit,

0 good and kind Bahá’u’lláh! Ron Gordon Kilally, Saskatchewan Reflection

Around me changes the ever changing. For the changing is He Who is spoken of as the All Powerful, Who is the changeless. And thus this great light never darkens but forever blazes over the ages in splendid beauty. Again in this age, in clothed beauty, does He return. O people who hear me! Study this wonderful Spirit which has touched the earths; Learn of the wisdom within its beauty so that you may arise in happiness and joy. O people! You know of Whom I speak. This new cycle has brought the Angel of all Glad Tidings. Ron Gordon

K ilally, Saskatchewan

The Perfect Silence

Here is the perfect silence

Above the white and blue of ancient walls,

The silver censer of the moon swings in mid-heaven.

Faint fragrance of white jasmine is the spirit of all love

Set free,—a still white flame within the crystal air.

Upon the seaward slope, the grove of giant pines

Is etched in majesty against the moonlit night;

Those tall black trunks are bars across the argent light,

A high barred window set against the sky.

At sunset, when I knelt within the Shrine

The windows to the west were walls of fire.

Within my soul the flame of His great Name

Was like a flashing sword, that severed all my past.

From this eternal moment I knew myself before the Face of God,

Too terrible His glory and too great His power! How shall one drop resist the ceaseless tide

Of His celestial sea ?

But now, when night is deep upon the land And the calm beauty of the moon

Moves softly through the vast ethereal arch, Peace breathes through every atom of the air And draws each living spark to one pure unity.

The Timeless holds this instant in His hand: “Be still, be still, and know that I am God!’ ’

Here is the perfect silence. Genevieve L. Coy

New Song

(And he hath put a new song in my mouth . . . Psalms 40:3)

It was comfortable in the smalltown smugness of your childhood. You were born securely into salvation’s complacent trinity,

a Catholic, Protestant or Jew. In a spasm of spiritual megalomania you praised His good judgment in selecting

such eminently deserving souls

for the gift of His exclusive One True Faith. But only on Sundays.

The world was small and safe and familiar.

And very white.

No red or black offended our prim steepled vaults of self-congratulation. Indians were the bad guys who got licked in movies,

dying copiously amid candy wrappers and the popcorn smell of matinees. Amos and Andy probably lived in some far place, like Hollywood,

or maybe in the radio. And there was no proof that God spoke Negro. You knew that He loved Canadians; they didn’t start wars.

He would approve our thrift and industry

and seeing our virtuous sunlit wheatfields, our unpretentious brick, He would agree with the Chamber of Commerce

that ours was a good town in which to live.

Yes, it was comfortable then.

[Page 642]642

r

THE BAHA’I WORLD

Of course there were a handful who found solace

in the medicinal doctrines of Muriel Sweetbun Udder,

or the burnished tablets of Myron J . Hammerschmitt;

a few who gathered in tents or behind vacant storefronts with ambitious titles attesting orthodoxy or reformation;

but then every town has its malcontents.

A small brave band scorned our comicbook catechism,

our insolent litany of insularity,

and made a kind of Faith of not-believing.

Still, God did not strike them dead.

He was said to be extraordinarily patient

with sinners and heathens.

When you heard that God had died, you wondered whether it was from sheer boredom—all that joyless music and our impudent prayers. Your sophomoric selfrighteousness would have been enough to do Him in.

So you would have described it then,

the frightened child

striving to cope with acne and Auschwitz

and an anger that sought release in a word powerful enough to shake the universe,

intimidate the stars,

blind to His love of the people of your town

for the innocence of their aspiration;

blind to their genuine virtue and power and beauty.

The tempest came in your twelfth or fifteenth year, a clean cold wind, and you were left like a stripped young tree in autumn

with a cynical winter setting in

and nothing large enough to house your impulse to believe.

The need lay as quiet, unhurried and insidious as a seed snowlocked in a bleak and lonely landscape.

But forgiveness came, an unselective flooding rain,

and the seed was there, a promise kept.

Even your rejection was forgiven

and in the burgeoning lovesap slowly stirred.

God hadn’t died, of course, abandoned us for Russia,

nor moved to Uganda.

You caught a glimpse of Him in the clearing smoke of the rifles

in the barrack-square of Tabríz;

heard a whisper in the soft silk dress of Táhirih, bridally white. His fragrance was carried by the wind startling the wildflowers

of the fields of Bérfurush where Quddfis was felled.

The stones of ‘Akká saw His beauty and His pain and cried aloud. On Carmel’s sandy slope you traced the outline of His tent and saw, in its tall cypress, the talisman of His triumph.

There is a new song.

Up from the Siyéh-Qal it rose, breaking the fiéh’s dream;

the Sultan turned in terror as its sweetness grew.

It echoed through the palaces of Europe, empty now.

The bells grew silent, the minarets fell mute;

the full-risen sun embarrassed our disputatious sputtering candles. Our doomed and desperate dissonance was stilled, trickling out

like the dismal incense rising from our saddened, separate altars.

The dust of §l_1iréz throbbed as Thornton Chase took up the song

and all the roses of Train spilled their musk triumphantly at Lua’s peal. Martha heard the music; its accents captivated May.

Westward it moved, and worldward,

rejoicing the trees of Adrianople as the chorus grew—Esslemont, Breakwell, Dreyfusand grew

and grew.

Now the earth is flooded with the felicity of this new song,

this Godsong.

Oh! Man must learn it well! Roger White