Poem 57
In Waiting For Godot the tramps wait but God does not come. Becket’s vision retreated inward to a dry voice in a barren head space. Francis too waits, and waits, but is sustained by the grandeur of cosmic evolution and by memories of the Beloved’s fugitive glance. A short poem about exile from the Wineshop is given all the power of epic.
What an immense journey it was from the bursting of the suns from your Word to this green earth!
Yet all the while Earth, fully formed, was hidden in the midst of the suns, waiting to take birth.
All the heavier elements of us and earth came from the violent explosion of a star, a supernova. But poetry, as it should, rises beyond the telling of chronology, to assert the kernel of purpose as the self- disclosure of God takes place.
Humanity, mirror of God, once free of the six prisons (the five senses plus mind) is capable, wondrously, of direct symbolic apprehension of the infinite, no wonder we might caper and sing. Even in stone our form was latent.
And hidden in the Earth was the face and form of Man waiting to break out
Of his six prisons and dance over the plains and hills with a mighty shout.
And hidden in men were monsters and fears (formed from the back-wash of your Whim’s word-flow),
And saints and singers to hew out space in the heart so that your Word’s love-seed could grow.
What a wayfaring! What a heroism you injected into us!
What an over-coming, what an accomplishing you expected of us!
We, God as individual creatures, endured this tremendous journey from the outer to the inner, from the gross world to the inner chamber of the heart. The back-wash is all the left over dogmas and rituals of past Avataric visits. Francis really wants emphasis here, he doesn’t usually lavish exclamation marks. But he brings us down to earth with the usual carefree attitude of the tavern dweller.
No wonder, Beloved, we are thirsty after such toil and travail—
No wonder there is no end to music’s voices and the singer’s tale!
Yet the wineshop door remains closed and the demijohn’s loud note has ceased,
And we’re invited no more by the Wine-master to the all-night feast.
But one honour is left us: to endure cheerfully not seeing the Beloved’s face—
To continue our singing in the dust before His door without receiving His Grace.
Demijohns are big containers for grog and their loud note is I guess their banging and clinking by enthusiastic patrons or the glug, glug of their pouring. We sit in the dust before the closed door but who cares when we are energised by such a celebratory poem as this!