Simple, yet vast beyond measure,
Three fires have lit my path,
Three hungers, more urgent than hunger,
More vital than the very breath I draw.
First is the longing for love –
Not the tender glancing love of spring
Nor the careless laughter of a passing eve,
But the deep, red-vined longing
That drives a soul to reach
Through shadow and solitude
For another’s trembling hand –
To gaze into eyes unafraid
Of all the wounds behind my quiet smile,
To answer yes,
Even as the night world shudders
With the absence of answers.
Second is the hunger to know,
A thirst that will not yield:
The slow gathering of wisdom
From the broken mosaics of truth;
The endless ache of unasked questions,
Bright in the dark skull’s vault,
To wonder why the stars burn,
What moves the mind beyond the flesh;
The longing to lay bare the engine of hope,
The machinery of joy, the anatomy of suffering –
To press deeper,
Ever deeper,
Even as the answers turn to mist,
And certainty withers in the palm.
Third is the bittersweet weight
Of seeing sorrow in the world –
Children’s tears at dusk,
The hollow-eyed labourer’s bent back,
The sudden void in a friend’s familiar chair.
An unbearable pity
For the suffering laid wide in every heartbeat,
A pain that pierces the abstract hush
Of libraries and lovers’ arms
To call me forth –
Not for heroics, not for glory –
But to cup the broken faces of grief,
To lift a neighbour’s fallen hope,
To bear a candle
Where the wind crowds out the rest.
Is it not strange,
That these passions – simple to name –
Have twisted me upon the rack of time,
Borne aloft in joy and then dashed
On the jagged rocks of loss and disappointment?
I sought peace,
And in seeking found ecstasy:
That sudden rush of union, mind and matter ablaze
With revelation or touch, too large for the heart to hold.
I found anguish:
The cold dawn when meaning slips from my grasp,
When those I love turn silent,
When knowledge shatters into unknowing.
I found madness,
A spinning mind fevered by unanswered prayers,
A body longing past all reason to heal another’s wound,
To make sense of it all.
I found loneliness –
Not the absence of company,
But that desert of the heart
Where no passion can cross into solace.
Year after year I spiralled,
A comet searing the blackness,
Haunted by hunger, by visions, by grief.
The world’s pain gnawed at my marrow;
My own restlessness bruised the dawn;
Peace was always one step further on the path,
A rumour, a promise,
Always almost, but never.
Yet as I grow older,
Bent by regrets and softened by compassion,
I have known, at last,
The gentleness of your presence –
You, whom I love,
And you, whose suffering I cradle,
And you, the silent teachers of truth,
Who come to me in the hush between thoughts.
In your light,
Ecstasy and peace blend to a single flame.
I learn, at last, how the struggle itself is meaning,
That to ache with love is better
Than numbness;
That to question, and fail, is finer
Than easy certainties;
That to weep for suffering is to be fully awake.
And in loving you,
In serving in small ways,
In seeking wisdom in the dustiest corners,
I find what I never found
When chasing peace for its own sake.
Now, if the shadows lie close,
If the night falls sooner than I dreamed,
Let me greet it not with emptiness
But with fullness –
Warm, remembered hands;
A page dog-eared with wonder;
A wound tended, however clumsily.
For three passions have made a life –
Not easy, but deep;
Not tranquil, but splendid with longing;
And from these fires in the darkness
I carry, at last,
A spark of peace.
Now, if I sleep,
I shall sleep fulfilled.
by Bakchos
