RonPrice
Joined: 01 Jul 2008
Posts: 12
Location: George Town Tasmania Australia
|
| Posted: Fri Mar 26, 2010 7:20 am Post subject: A Dance of the Mind |
|
|
SOMETHING GOLD CAN STAY1
This poem draws its inspiration, indeed much of its conceptual material, from some of the essays of Jack McLean in his second book Under the Divine Lote Tree which I bought in Chicago at the Baha’i bookshop on the temple grounds in Wilmette on my way from Australia to Haifa. The pilgrim from the antipodes and the islands of the Pacific can, indeed, have a mini-pilgrimage on the way to Haifa by stopping at Honolulu, Wilmette and London. Each pilgrim, of course, enriches his or her own pilgrimage in different ways. This book’s contents, written by a Baha’i I knew forty years ago and have not met since, enriched my time in Israel and contained the basis for this poem. -Ron Price with thanks to Jack McLean, Under the Divine Lote Tree: Essays and Reflections, George Ronald, 1999.
1 Robert Frost has a line in a poem “Nothing gold can stay” from a poem with these same words in Selected Poems of Robert Frost, p.138. I have slightly altered the emphasis in line with my own particular philosophy.
What sweetness can I suck
out of these many years
which seem to take my
everything away, far away?
What seam of gold seems to stay
through all these years day after day?
From the sweet-scented streams of
Thine eternity give me to drink1 and
so create my own destiny beyond the
outrages of fate and fortune, twisted
reach of crazy sorrow, the impostures
of joy and sadness who dance minuet
in an ever-changing duet in my mind.
1 Baha’u’llah, Baha’i Prayers.
Ron Price
9 June 2000 |
|
