The Abundance of Brightness
by Dorothy WaltersOriginal Language English
God is not unknown on account of obscurity
but on account of the abundance of brightness.
-- St. Thomas Aquinas
1.
Dante Mounting to the Rose of Heaven
Not one of us
could breathe this air,
face this naked radiance
unscathed.
Here music turns to light,
a tone so sweet
that we, dulled by
our familiar calliope,
mistake its sound for silence.
Dante, mounting to tiers of
trembling flame,
found light. Light everywhere.
Circles, wheels,
light on light,
a dance of invisibles.
The flames pulsating, as if
measuring the breath of heaven.
At the last, he falls forward,
caught in widening rings
of implacable bright.
2.
At Eleusis
Even at Eleusis,
after the long journey,
the sea-bath among the sacred waves,
the accounts of the grieving mother
and her vanished child,
at the end
the shouts rang out
like birth-cries in the throats
of the startled pilgrims, blinded
by the flare of torches sweeping
from frames of darkness.
Then silence. Then they saw.
3.
A Celebration
And then quiet.
Someone who whispers:
now we are free.
Which was, almost,
true,
but only in the way
a bird,
leaving a limb,
goes freely into
a different realm,
an atmosphere
more pure,
more transparent,
but that, too,
maintaining its fixities.
4.
The Clinging
[for those who] have beheld the Tao... gems sparkle on dusty roads; puddles appear as pools of lapis lazuli; tough weeds acquire fragile beauty...
-- John Blofield
The I Ching calls it clinging, fire:
"Fire has no definite form,"
it says,
"but clings to the burning object
and thus is bright."
 | -- from Marrow of Flame : Poems of the Spiritual Journey, by Dorothy Walters |
<<Previous Poem | More Poems by Dorothy Walters | Next Poem >>
/ Image by Hoang Giang Hai /
View All Poems by Dorothy Walters
I hope you will pause to reread this poem a few times. It has several lines that can bring you to a full stop. The images of Dante encountering the circles of light. That final line from "At Eleusis." The way, in "A Celebration," a bird taking flight shifts worlds, enters a new reality. In "The Clinging," the way the fixed object burns bright and gives root to formless fire, and in so doing returns to formlessness itself.
Recommended Books: Dorothy Walters
