Sing To Me Softly Of Earth - Part One

Jaleel Akbash

Jaleel Akbash - Unsplash

Authored by A. S. Kline © Copyright 1999 All Rights Reserved.

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No Mind

Under the dark tree, no Mind made us.

In the gold desert flowering after rain,

in the blue desert, no Mind watching us.

Hedges dark-scented.

Lanes where stone steps glisten,

where the wind quickens. No Mind.

And no Mind watches now as we walk back

towards the past ages, free of gods, full of feeling.

Under the sky where no-one knew us, we knew ourselves.

On the grasslands, the savannahs,

on the steppes, the prairies,

as the creatures flowed past us. No Mind watched.


First Light

No god, no soul, no spirit, no beyond.

No other life, no hell, eternity.

No sin, no fall, no grace, no redemption.

No dim confessional.

No ought, no outer meaning.

No given, man

No free-will, no direction.

No destiny but form and breath and choice,

the endless view scaling out in distance.

No victim and no eden, wheel or eye.

No rebirth, and no snake coiled in the dark,

head flattened against being.

No call to us, no cry.

The sky

like the first white of sky in the first dawn.


Winter,Night,or Both

Intrudes into the eye a coldness that outlasts

of unrelated magnitude's coincident glare.

It is the glimmer of time, unstartled by humanity,

arriving at the human.

We watch ourselves, while Nothing else watches.

Form in the unplanned world is the sound that air makes

to our ear, without sense of beginning, unfilled

with our absence, carrying no message but origin.


Nocturne

The moth on the leaf of night,

makes something of the minuteness of the real.

It flutters and is fluttered by the mind.

Galaxy and eye are fluttered.

Moth climbs, through falling light,

through the white gravity of how things are.


Ex Nihil

We are Mind and no mind made us

in the pale dawn of deserts

spirits softly moving

the slow human commerce

the freight of earth-seas.

Mind learns a complex waiting

of snowed trees in winter

the cold of ice boughs

that have been there colder

in the stand of night

and holding out for a light

glittering with thaw not snowfall

Mind waits. Are we waiting

for more than our survival

among leaves also waiting ?

We are Mind and no mind made us

out of the nothing beyond us

or the nothing inside us.