The Community A Vision

 

 

 

The community a Vision the poet is called to build

      from the heart going outward,

                    a Thread woven throughout its fabric

              of what is,

                               transforming it

                from the inside

       as snakelike moving along irrepressibly

                                           to become

                          what must be

if the sense of our belonging together

                                        —today—

                    is to cohere,

if true justice of place be done,

                         even when,

                                         telling it like it is,

someone must take account,

                                    be the mythos maker

 

                                                     the Word

 

                                                    we live by

 

The Word has come,

it lives through my Song,

                         a Thread of Gold

                                          in the stream—

Look—

& you will see it flashing

                                   as the waters

                                               around it

                               against rock

               splash & flow—

 

 

The Word has come,

here, on The Cruz,

                         the sign

                                 of an Age

   dismembered & dying...

                      & it’s such a slow death—

      but someday,

                new named,

                         new born,

             someday will be—

 

                                   And so I, too,

              was dismembered

                                      & died

                         on The Cruz,

                  & was reborn

                               through Vision,

      a new Seed of me

            out of Monterey Bay,

                    out of her submarine canyon depths,

        I planted in the heart,

                                  in the heart

                                                 of The Cruz

 

where it begins,

this place

      birthplace of Vision

      where Psyche the Word was born,

      where Technos—today's God—

      looms

               from over the mountain

                                      to encounter Psyche,

         our new Divinity to be

      —we will witness the confrontation—,

this place

      where the Integration of us must happen

               here,

                      in our New Age Athens.

 

The bowl was placed before me,

its rim of Santa Cruz Mountains, Monterey Bay

      & Pacific Ocean

In it, the creative mash of surfers & fishermen, farmers & poets,

of dancers, writers, artists & musicians, street people & performers,

of entrepreneurs & restaurateurs, of high-tech geeks, students

      & student perennials,

of fringe scientists & inventors, small & local business owners,

of hemp activists, ecoactivists, feminists, astrologers, psychics,

of Wiccans, pagans, Buddhists, evangelists, Rastafarians,

      of college instructors & UC professors,

of alternative health practitioners, herbalists & healers,

of meditators, spiritual teachers, retirees & time-warp children

      of the Sixties,

& all folk of conventional ways who make up community—

 

I have eaten of it.

 

 

 

 

1999