Grammar of Grief

Sonnet — Daily Poetry to The Master of Works #36

“No more”, cried I, “no more to learn from lips all mortal,
Grant me great Mother, grant me the One, the Primordial
As Sire and Seer who shall unknot my cords of ignorance!”.
“Hmm”, She said, “But canst thou match pace with His decrees?”

Said I, “For Him O Mother I pine and wait through these lives,
What labour or anguish have I not borne in earthly bodies!”.
And She said, “Fool, in all the precipitous ends I wait for thee,
By my hands art thou still loitering in time with fortune uncanny.”

“Flesh and bone, mind and heart, is all by Thee O Mother,
All I am and all I become, only by Thy light do I gather,
Yet a son must know his sire and hence I fervently plead,
No more cycles, no more roads through the human creed!”

“So be it”, said She, “venture then under His severe gaze,
Find for thyself the Truth more arduous than the human maze!”.
Then by a spell of birth and a stupor of ignorance I wandered
Scouring the shores of life for my redeemer Sire to be found.

In a dusty tome I discovered the portal door unassumingly hid
And all the timeless lore He had luminously over ages engineered.
Ah, what fortune, thought I, to be under the gaze of the all-seeing Eye,
To find what is not to be found even in heaven most high!

By a great many askesis and long enduring loss managed the feat
Of clambering through His chamber door and crawling to His feet.
Asked I, “What luminous lesson under the stars wilt Thou teach
O my blessed Sire to me aching for Thy word’s divine pitch?”

Said He, “Infantile fool, what mire hast thou gathered below
Dabbling with the loom of works that through the hours flow,
Heed carefully, for the scheme for thee is necessarily brief,
One last lesson to letter thee in the grey grammar of grief.”

By a cry I tore through the spell of that luminously terrible dream,
And called the Mother, “No more, no more abandon me to Him,
O Mother, strange is His truth, stranger His teaching ways,
Keep me by Thy maternal feet, shield me by Thy measured grace!”

Said She, “For thou seest two where there is but an undivided one
Thou art appalled by all that is to thee divinely done.
The storm and zephyr is but same, masks to baffle surface belief,
Heed the lesson hid for thee in the grammar of grief,

For we orbit thee ever closer, each day brings close the luminous hour,
Endure and become, shrink not from the labour and clamour,
Then thou shalt in the revealing hour plainly see
All that casts thee down and raises thee up is only I and He!”