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Lynne was a Sahaja Yogini from Cape Town, South Africa. She was a book
publisher and, as you will see, a published poet of considerable talent. She gave these
poems to me when she knew her remainng time here was short and she asked that I publish
these if I had the chance.
She wasn't the type to talk about her ills, but I learned that
she'd had had cancer before she first took her Self-realization and eventually it returned
and she died, but in a way that everyone around her, Sahaja yogis or not, were completely
inspired by the manner of her passing.
Indeed, when her family and friends came out of the crematorium, a white dove, took off
and sailed up to the heavens. Lynne’s daughter told me that she was sure it was her
Mother’s soul.Lynne was totally surrendered and once said
to me that when your body is too far gone, it's best to die and come back again, a
realized soul in a new body. She was unquestionably a great soul, a deep seeker, and
a gifted poet. I hope you will enjoy these poems as much as I continue to do.
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The Door of Mysteries
Open the door of mysteries
Let me go through.
Cloaked, and a little lonely
Like all who set out on journeys alone.
Yet scarcely looking back,
Since each step must be taken
with attention, each step counts:
Already you are elsewhere,
Gone ahead of yourself.
You must spiral in
through yet more skins
(though many have been stripped off since this began),
turn inward like the whorled ear
to delicate chambers of nacreous dawn.
The turret's stairs wind down,
cold steel at heel and arm.
Here at the bottom, or another time,
after one or other descent,
the secret may be revealed.
The mystery of mysteries perhaps will be:
another door.
Or should you turn, go up the stair?
Back to where that fresh outer air
Where everything -
bird, rose, water stream,
the light on leaves -
manifests the mystery.
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Vindicated
Always, throughout my years,
I was prepared to spend
long hours looking.
Just looking.
Stars, raindrop
on a twig,
a spider’s web,
stripes on a blade of grass,
the seedhead and the bee.
Mountain, leopard, cloud.
Wind and water. Wheat.
Who will do things?
How will they get done
if you’re a dreamer?
If everyone …
So the story ran.
The hours were truant, stolen,
rumoured to be lost.
But still I sought them out,
stubbornly, hungrily.
Now I know
these were the only hours
that were right.
all bustle, bother, wringing
of hands
has blown out of time.
And here I am, still
kneeling by a flower,
steeped
in eternity: home.
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Rosa mundi (for Our Mother)
I saw creation, nothing less.
Closing my eyes in hospital
for solace, denied egress
from one small spot, a bed,
not so much of pain as rough
discomfort, where battleground
nausea raked my consciousness.
You cannot will a vision.
It must come, unearned or earned.
I do not moralise, merely conclude
the universe is given, hence, a gift.
Mine was the reddest rose
I ever saw. I left it to grow richer,
deeper, unable to think of velvet
or the ruby glass of Chartres
(which came after), but sank
into the redness, into rose
grown from the inner eye, from soul.
Wondering, I knew
even such redness isn’t all:
from the petals, from the throat
came dancing endlessly
the finest, spitting rain of gold,
as fireworks or welders
shower sparks
that fall and fall,
astonishing the eye.
I understood:
surfaces that seem static
burst with life
of we knew but the frequency.
Stones hum, bricks shimmer,
the very leaves drip silver.
Air is charged with moving motes.
Life happens every moment:
creation’s never done.
The rose of the world
does not sleep: She
burns on.
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The Earth is in Meditation
The earth is in meditation,
rock sure between what passes,
girt with sea and river.
Mountains are its power,
immoveable, their heads like lions’
thrust into sun, storm, cloud.
Effortless, the antelope
bounds up the slope,
Arrow-swift, graceful, it too
is in meditation, being mostly dearly
itself, unaware of otherness,
intent with life and joy
in the paradise of now.
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Bare Flute
After four years of the illness so dreaded
most hesitate to name it,
to my surprise I find
the darkness only a seeming.
In truth how I feel
is light: burned clean
Burned clean beyond
the terrible scream
of the melting at the stake
Burned clear as bone
in the veldt, picked white
by wind and heat
Burned bare, clear
as a flute of silver
tuned to the breath of God
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Learning to be Still
In this narrow bed, I lie
attempting the patience of a shell
that catches light and sound
but makes no move, by no effort of its own
stranded on the sand.
I hear what comes:
traffic like water.
small birds chattering,
the dove that asks ’Where’s Father?’
over and again.
Footsteps and pieces
of private conversation,
comforting as random stones
picked up and pocketed.
What comes is welcome, outside control –
Casual, miraculous.
As if I had been deaf
and now may hear
only what is fresh,
the purest gift.
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Grass is Humble
Grass is humble, always grass.
So that we’d know it anywhere –
Africa or Italy, walking
In and our of time.
Blink, and a century is gone.
The whole delicate web that makes
a world – intricate,
insistent as this pulse
inside my wrist –
continues without effort.
There’s no weariness now,
no sense that I must shoulder guilt,
assume responsibility.
I have put down the world, grown lighter.
I have become ‘brightface’.
The spirit moves within,
and in and out of time:
this life, that one;
rich, poor,; speaking English
or a tongue I have never dreamed
my lips could find as familiar as fruit.
No matter where, or how,
only the why:
that I should grow within,
the ‘I’ that is this humble spirit,
swift as grass, humble,
certain – everywhere grass,
under the bright and changeless sky.
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