By Jane Tawel, July 19, 2024
*
The prophets and the poets,
don’t make much money.
Living not by their wits,
but desperately by what they hope is their wisdom,
they often are fasting
to lose the weight of the world,
to be thin enough that all becomes transparent.
If only they could share the truth,
with words that lighten and light.
Eating one’s words
starves one of daily bread.
And the vines of divine revelation
produce only vinegar and thirst.
The prophets cry, “We Thirst.”
And the poets mourn,
“Why use bread for war and not peace?”
*
Eventually, the prophets and the poets,
have no alternative,
but to leave the bone-dry banks,
and float downstream.
Unmoored
Unleashed
Unmourned
Adrift.
And there are those days
(and some dark, lonely nights)
when they are desperate to paddle to the shores,
where the solid people stand,
counting profits and not prophecies,
gathering praises and not poems.
Oh, the prophets and the poets have been too long starved.
They have no sensibility
of what others call sense
And at last, as they float,
yearning words fail the poets
and the prophets can only mumble —
their rage, silenced into grumbling.
*
The crowds have been against them
throwing stones, covering them
in their rubble of words.
They have been censored
by the ennui of the poor
and the materialism of the mercenary
by the loud and the proud,
by the honey-ed and the money-ed,
by the fountain of youth
that all seek who fear old souls.
Silence for the prophets is not golden tongued,
but a still, small whisper.
And the poets are gathered,
at the still point of the turning world,
but yet to join The Dance.
They await their chance.
Leaden-footed verses pull them down
in their clumsy hopes.
*
And the poets and the prophets
raise hushed voices to the Sky.
“Deliver us”, they cry.
But their words float up
as the Streams of consciousness
carry them away.
*
Will the gods some day find
at the end of the World’s Waterways,
a happy band of sufferers,
of seers, and seekers,
and all the least listened to —
Find them at the End,
playing weightlessly in the waves,
splashing each other with imagery and symbols,
fishing for food for thought?
Will the mighty someday look down from their rocky peaks,
and find that they have climbed too high
and the dive down now would kill them?
Will we who ignored the song-writers,
the soothsayers,
the children and the very old,
will we left behind
find that we stopped up our ears
and we hardened our hearts
as we hardened our flesh?
Will we discover that we heard only noise
and spoke only words of deaf prose?
Will we find that we have dried-up all the waters
that would have carried us along
buoyed up with the words of the poets and the seers?
Will we some day see
that our stony hearts,
and our craggy consciousness,
did not bring our statues to life,
but made our idols into dead gods?
*
Oh, My people!
Will we turn out our pockets and know at last
that the pebbles we kept
and refused to toss in to The Stream,
were only great weights on our souls,
holding us down, down, down, as we rose,
drowning us in our own dry deserts as we drank,
and in our refusal to listen
bursting our ears with the beat of our drums?
*
Oh, we should have listened
to the old,
to the wise,
to the poets
and prophets,
to the cries of the children,
and the messages of the myth-makers.
And now the
poets and prophets float free.
Finally,
their Truth
and The Way of The Words,
have released them
restored them
rebirthed them.
They have been moved
as they never moved others
into The Deep Watery Way.
Now continually composing
in Never-ending New Creation,
They rise.
Dancing waves suspended
in Eternity’s Ocean,
At last…
As One…
As One…..
© Jane Tawel, 2024
Jane Tawel 