Reflection and revelation

I.

I gaze upon you on the sand

a whisper of fresh breath of the morn

The ocean bathes your feet

soft, blemished, product of earth

smoothing the tan lines with grains

a pliable patch of grains

into which our hard heels press

washed o'er in a splash

II.

Yet who knows who we are

resting 'neath the coconut palm

Myst'ries lay at our feet

our hands touching the surest of them

Here the milk of the husked nut refreshes

where getting drunk leaves us dry

and even the smell of fecal sweetness

is more real than perfume sprayed on thighs

We are palettes of pigments

a canvas of gods, sketched by God

a mark like lips parting

murmuring theophanies in the universe

oblivious to our power at hand

hiding behind masks of gauze

III.

Myst'ry

we  are plump myst'ry

and if we'd touch just a hand

it is this we'd touch

this painting of God

with God in ev'ry tint 

*Reflections of Sidney Poitier:

-I called David Suskind, and I told him what the situation was, and he said, "Let me have a go at this."

I said, "Fine."   But I went on to explain that I simply couldn't do this.  I knew all about the rightwing,  leftwing tug-of-war stuff.  I was perfectly capable of interpreting it on the basis of how it affected me as a black man in America.  My political awareness had matured by then.  Yes, I was definitely, by then, inclined toward the left of center. Yes, there I found more people like Phil Rose and David Suskind, people demonstrating a genuine willingness to receive me as an equal.  This was reason enough, I suppose, for the FBI to keep an eye on me, given the fear and panic of those terrible cold war days of madness.  A time in which a young, African-American male was at  odds with his times and in constant search for answers to the core conflicts in his life.  Conflicts that had little or nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the cultural forces rooted inside him and the multitude of daily surrenders demanded of him by their social surroundings.  Balance is what he was looking for, but he hadn't yet learned its name.  In time he will come to know it as a state of being.  It can only be found at a place that is widely believed not to exist.  Truth is that there is a place of space that does exist between two opposites everywhere, and somewhere therein dwells a point at  which balance can be found. 

we'd collapse enthralled

if we but speak

one to the other

op'ning like a flower

facing the sun

loos'ning its grip

'bout the treasure within

for in the unspoken 

treasures lay

waiting for ears

hearing more than words

and eyes grasping

more than skin

but a flame bracing

awaiting release

o'er the horizons of doubt

or differences smaller 

than a mustard seed

we'd spot humming birds

nesting in truth

pecking to be born

before suspicion was our face

and bias pressed us down

sounds stirred whisps'rings

let's speak

break the chains

offer hope a bit

*You have to forgive yourself first for being human, because to be human is to have lots of faults; so you have to forgive, and then the love flows in.

  -Marion Woodman

*Addictions can be transcended - not eliminated.

  -Richard S. Sandor

Following night's yonder star

Through the woods You lead me

along the one path to Dawn

to one Tree uplifting

to say, "Into Your hands"

along that road to Daybreak

through the dark wood beck'ning

with tears in the trekking

and vision in the hark'ning

to stare straight through the Night

'long the challenging direction

to entrust self to Your Spirit

the Compass for my wand'ring

Thus I stumble into Dawn

with farewell to my crutches

to the landmarks I had chosen

walking where You'd lead me

to be what You'd make me

following night's yonder star

*Reflections of Sidney Poitier:

-...nowhere along the roads I traveled can I recall ever hearing the words "outsider" applied to me.  I had for years considered myself an old hand at the game of staying alive.  But with failure  walking in my shadow every minute, waiting for the misstep that could derail my whole existence, "survivor" seemed to me a more appropriate label under which my life should be filed.

Over time, however, I began to notice the frequency with which "outsider" was applied to others. The term began to resonate with me, causing me to wonder who I was really, at the center of myself. Eventually, I came to see myself in the outsider, and the outsider in me.  I knew that outsider and survivor often work as partners, but they're not twins.

What was it about outsiders, I wondered, that attracted the curiosity of others?  What made such personalities tick?  What were the forces driving them - forces that kept them intact and in motion, moving to the beat of their own drum, no matter what?  Was theirs a way of life rooted in sacrifice and challenge in defense of nobler purposes and higher values?  Or was it a lifestyle of out-of-control appetites in a materialistic environment?  Were outsiders simply trespassers, obliged by the nature of their lives to be constantly on the alert, known as "one of those" but never as "one of us"?

For me as a young man, the most relevant question was, How might such an outsider expect his life to unfold?  What were the penalties? What beauties occurred and what scars resulted from all those times when a life-altering situation suddenly jumped in his face, blocked his path, issued a threat, or laid down a challenge?  Daring him to pass through if he were foolish enough to think he had the stuff to do so.  "You gotta get by me, if survival is what you're after.  So suit up, Mr. Outsider.  To get where you think you want to go, you have five minutes to become a flesh-and-blood person walking in shoes you've never even tried on.  But first you've got to out maneuver me."

Only in my sixties did I fully absorb my outsider status and begin to settle into some kind of comfort with it.  I'd been on the fringes for fifty-odd years whether I knew it or not, so at last I accepted the likelihood that I would always be an outsider. 

Some tenets belong to night

Can't we hear ourselves?

Is there no echo, no caution pounding at our heart

barreling down the Halls of Time?

Have we inherited the mantle of immortality in vain?

Why feign deafness when hist'ry screams

and the ghosts of death wail from their graves?

Have we forgot as niggras lynched forgot

as so many peons crushed beneath notice forgot?

Have we forgot lies passed one generation to the next

like forgers repeating crimes the murderers forgot?

It's grace to go deaf, to fake blindness in the sun

to be on TV laughing when they hang the scum

then view their bodies urinating upon themselves.

What we bear is ign'rance passing each other in fear

the unmarked enemy snoring in our beds.

Our curtains hide, our shades reveal tales.

Our rural routes are hostels along which intellectuals flee.

Does it matter, then, the naming of our god

when the religion of the nation is the godness of the people?

Can't god be substance and yet bottom of the pit?

Some tenets belong to night alone

like sensible wars and spare revolutions.

*Reflections of Sydney Poitier:

  -A survival tactic that worked well for me was one I had gotten from my mother: "Charm them, son," she said, "into neutral."  Being charming bought me tine by allowing me to at least temporarily deflect the jabs of a threatening society.

You can see, within the context of how I lived and how I was beginning to work out a relationship between myself and the complex place,  that I wasn't free to indulge totally in delights.  There were delights; there were indulgences.  But I never lost sight of the fact that I had to cover my back, that I was always onstage.

Society had created laws to keep me at a distance, or out of sight altogether.  Learning to survive in that often-hostile world was trail-and-error, step-by-step; and just as when I was learning to pick fruit from the sapodilla trees, I often got stung.

"Oh, so that's how that works," I would realize.  So my closet is full of encounters and mistakes and tools and lessons learned truly the hard way.