In midst of madness, love,
and yearning's sigh
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original poetry and photos— by @d-pend —
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In midst of madness, love, and yearning's sigh,
The lamp of life attains a zenith high.
Its light has broken wide the shroud of night,
And paved a way for beings to begrudge
The rough foundations half-made, half-unmade
By scheming of their organism old
Atop insistent outgrowth of the wild.
So let me sit a while, weary child
Of skeletons and flame, half-way unwound
By time's brutality, and half-assuaged:
By water of eternity dissolved.
A wind arises, sets the chimes to play
And whispers through the crevices of noon.
As much by what prevents as what allows
The motions of the squall and wispèd clouds
Is tenor of the planet made concrete,
And grasp I dimly destiny replete
With wide significance and narrow gate
That channels all the crowd to nexus small:
Implosion soon-impending by the weight
Of exponential knowledge's rapid find.
So much lies undisclosed to partial mind—
The motivations of the vast divine,
The meaning and the movement of the orbs,
The consequence of action by the sword
Half-oxidized, full-swung, the blunted brain
Which ponderous, sets fire to the plain
And arrogant, on pedestal the lord
Of pleasant nothingness, inflated thought
By pinprick of the real depressurized.
In stillness strength accumulates apart
From chaos of the ignorant acclaim
Of human voices for the human frame,
Construction of a rude and rigid art
Proceeds with beep mechanical, and drone
Of treads harsh-threading some disturbèd field
Of desolated biome, cleansèd slate
To raise a new idealist estate
Where insects used to scurry, royalty
Proclaimèd by disaster, urgency
And pleasure intermingling in a stream
Of humankind's discordant, dismal dream.
O where aside from temple of the soul
Is found the noble impetus, the strand
Of fertile silt whereto the living trek
To make their all-magnetic pilgrimage
To have what may be had, and may be made
By industry of hand and mind, machine
Extracted from the elemental mien
Of planet-skin, and from the deeper veins
Of early volatility's remains—
When magma, smoke and thunder scoured earth
Presaging endings from the very birth
Of power in the physical domain.
But let me sit a while, weary child
Of skeletons and flame, halfway unfound
By truth's lucidity, and half-fulfilled:
Contented let me sit, let me rebuild.
In sitting do those phantoms dissipate;
For me all things lie open by the rays.
Forgotten are the nightmares of decline
Whose plague has wide dispersèd by the breeze
And siphoned off to some distant locale.
Now dynamo of heat and primal light;
Dispel and pierce the haggard veil of night.
In midst of madness, love, and yearning's sigh,
The lamp of life attains a zenith high.
— published on-chain April 24, 2020 —
