On his death

There he lay,

cold, but warm still.

Does the spirit linger,

as bodies warmth, lingers,

still.

He departed the world,

and his once warm body,

as his son was in,

the nearby room.

The son performed his daily, tasks.

Helping bank customers,

on the phone, who,

we're experiencing,

the worst day of their life.

60 times a day the son,

helped a customer who life savings,

had been taken.

They needed a new debit card,

or an address updated,

or who could not access,

their online balance.

Then departed he, then,

while others waited,

for his son to help,

and comfort them.

Did his spirit then linger, still

as the warmth of his body,

lingered, still?

His son desired not this day,

then.

The diapers to change.

The urinal to empty.

The medicine every four hours,

to administer.

To ask help of the ward members,

The President of the Elders, replied,

was too much to ask.

Thus were they together, 

in this, task, this day,

trapped, though the end be near.

The relief then comes,

from the nurse, medication,

morphine, 

like a gift from God,

to ease the transition,

to his next stage.

Does he leave this life,

then comforted, 

to know his son,

loved him, still?

What then of the Angel in the Garden?

What use could an angel be to him? 
Then here, in the Garden.

Remove not the pain, could he now.
Carry not the burden, could he then.

Strengthen the Savior?
Maybe.

Once in literature, another came,
to strengthen, a chosen one.
though in story, and myth,
yet a lesson to contrast,
still.

On a hero's journey,
Frodo had been sent,
to cast the ring into Mount Doom.

In the end, his strength failed him,
at his faithful side was Samwise Gamgee.
Carry not the burden could Samwise, 
but carry Mr. Frodo then could he.

Some speculate that the Angel was Michael.
to remind him of his Eternal Parents, 
faith and confidence in his ability,
to carry this load. 

If it is Micheal, 
then remember not that Michael,
became Adam, whose spouse,
had helped him choose the better path. 

The two, the angel and the Christ,
completing one Eternal Round,
a circular path to then lead.

The second creations,
to return the boon,
on their Heroes' Journey. 

On Poetry and Rhetoric (Yeats)

 We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing amid our uncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty by the knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders. I think, too, that no fine poet, no matter how disordered his life, has ever, even in his mere life, had pleasure for his end. Johnson and Dowson, friends of my youth, were dissipated men, the one a drunkard, the other a drunkard and mad about women, and yet they had the gravity of men who had found life out and were awakening from the dream; and both, one in life and art and one in art and less in life, had a continual

[Pg 30] preoccupation with religion. Nor has any poet I have read of or heard of or met with been a sentimentalist. The other self, the anti-self or the antithetical self, as one may choose to name it, comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion is reality. The sentimentalists are practical men who believe in money, in position, in a marriage bell, and whose understanding of happiness is to be so busy whether at work or at play, that all is forgotten but the momentary aim. They find their pleasure in a cup that is filled from Lethe’s wharf, and for the awakening, for the vision, for the revelation of reality, tradition offers us a different word—ecstasy. An old artist wrote to me of his wanderings by the quays of New York, and how he found there a woman nursing a sick child, and drew her story from her. She spoke, too, of other children who had died: a long tragic[Pg 31] story. “I wanted to paint her,” he wrote, “if I denied myself any of the pain I could not believe in my own ecstasy.” We must not make a false faith by hiding from our thoughts the causes of doubt, for faith is the highest achievement of the human intellect, the only gift man can make to God, and therefore it must be offered in sincerity. Neither must we create, by hiding ugliness, a false beauty as our offering to the world. He only can create the greatest imaginable beauty who has endured all imaginable pangs, for only when we have seen and foreseen what we dread shall we be rewarded by that dazzling unforeseen wing-footed wanderer. We could not find him if he were not in some sense of our being and yet of our being but as water with fire, a noise with silence. He is of all things not impossible the most difficult, for that only which comes easily can[Pg 32] never be a portion of our being, “Soon got, soon gone,” as the proverb says. I shall find the dark grow luminous, the void fruitful when I understand I have nothing, that the ringers in the tower have appointed for the hymen of the soul a passing bell.

Per Amica Silentia Lunae, by William Butler Yeats

By Friendly Silence of the Moon