poetry

Tears Flood the Garden. {Poetry}

 

How can I introduce a poem? A poem is an entity that stands alone.

It must introduce itself, give itself and then dissolve into the mysterious anthology where all poems live together in the moment of what has been, what is, and what will be. Perhaps a poem needs this community as much as human souls need each other.

Perhaps the poet needs the White Goddess — that infinite muse who, in all her terror and splendor, tears the poets to their reality, forcing them to remember whom they serve.

The time is nigh, the time is night.
Chaos reigns, turmoil, fright.
Choicelessly we take this ride
War-torn, tense, reckless, wild.

What else will birth the world’s new child?

Tears Flood the Garden

Tears flood the garden
A botanical garden designed as refuge from the world
Of four-lane traffic, high-rises, and sinking swamplands —
This garden of tropical flowers, plants, trees and sunlight
With its fractured shadows dancing on the lanai —
Comforts me as I grieve the disease and ruins of our earth
As I visit Virgil’s Eclogues of green unfurled,
As I lament the loss of the natural world.

I awoke in the night from undigested food burning my throat
And stumbled to the kitchen to sip apple cider vinegar
Back in bed, my body shuddered
I was afraid.
I fell back to sleep till morning
I awoke in terror.
I cannot assimilate.

Is this Yeats’ Second Coming?

I bathed, then fell to the floor, yoga opening the floodgates
Tears flooding the garden
I cried: If I can’t talk to you, then whom?
If I went to a doctor, would he tell me I am dying?
But dying is merely a statistic in today’s death-weary world —
No one cares for a statistic
So if I can’t talk to you, then whom?

Spanning decades in my life
The writings of contemporary teachers forewarned this end
They are dead now.
The writings of the old ones foresaw this day for centuries
They no longer live here.
But they are more alive than those now walking the Earth
So if I can’t speak to them, then whom?

I am keening
I search for meaning
Something is upon us:

“The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…”
— Yeats said that.

One hundred years later, the Coming has come
— I said that.

I feel it in the anima mundi
I feel it in my body-soul
I hear it in the dying toll —
Humanity impaled on God’s piercing steeple
So many seized and sickened people.

I am crying in the garden,
Am I dying in the garden?
If not you, then who can tell me
From your verdant, virgin garden?

***

Pamela Preston, a student of Carl Jung, Robert Graves, and the dead poets and philosophers, embarked on a literary, mythological quest in 1992 with a typewriter and a one-way ticket for Paris, France. Based in the French countryside for 20 years, Ms. Preston continues living and writing her personal myth in a world that is losing its agrarian culture and its legends. She adheres to the words of C.G. Jung, “… a myth is dead if it no longer lives and grows.” Pamela’s books and mandalas can be found on Marianne Press and Mythic Threads.

***

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