Lunar Soil
I finished the entire fifth draft of my epic poem The Parliament of Poets, after four years of writing, on March 30, 2012. I’d welcome invitations to read from it.
See my reading at the Buffalo Small Press Book Fair, Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum, March 24, 2012, from Book III, in medias res, on the moon. Copyright (c) 2012 Frederick Glaysher.
“Who needs warp drive when I’ve got Queen Mab,
My escort and midwife of my dreams.”
YouTube: https://youtu.be/XlWTzhNjIb4
Filed under Epic
Unity of Being
W. B. Yeats struggled for, but never achieved, Unity of Being, seeking it throughout A Vision. For all his phantasmagoria, he could not create or renew a convincing vision, a Unity of Being.
I believe a vision can be achieved but on the moon, or from the moon–our time has seen and felt the impact of the great symbol, Mother Earth, her circling embrace, as her arms wrap around us, a celestial Rose Image, terrestrial oxymoron of the Universe.
Viewing our homeland from space, who can doubt that Unity of Being begins to return?
Filed under Universality
Johnny-Come-Lately
The Detroit News headline for Monday, July 21, 1969, reads, “Footprints on the Moon!” I can still vividly recall watching, as a young boy, it happen on black and white TV, along with my family and the many millions around the world. It fired my young fifteen-year-old imagination like nothing else I had known. I had always been thrilled by the entire space program, my father having worked on making the heat shield for one of the re-entry capsules. And then the incredible event itself, in prime time TV, “one giant leap for mankind.” I was there with the astronauts, walking on the moon.
My family saved the complete front-page section of The Detroit News for that day. Eventually, it became my copy of the great event that dad and all the nation had worked for, the greatest technological achievement of human history. As the years went by, I found myself still thinking about our human visit to the moon, going back and re-reading that section of The Detroit News, as it has increasingly yellowed and frayed and brittled. The writer of the main front page article made one revealing comment which he seemed to think everyone would understand and agree with: “it was not necessary to send poets to the moon.” What? The falsehood and injustice of that comment increasingly struck me, as my study of poetry and culture deepened with the years. Who did these Johnny-Come-Latelys think they were? The hubris and arrogance of scientism seethed in that one sentence, the “two cultures” implicit in it.
Poets have been on the moon for millennia.
Filed under Epic
Crescent Earth, Apollo 11 on Return Trip
It was, I suppose, out of my reading, partly, in high school, of the religious scriptures of the world religions that my consciousness began to open up to other ways of life and thought, belief and faith, practice and sensibility. Later, in college, other classes in world religions and religious studies, Christian and otherwise, with continual reading of and beyond poets and writers, broadened my worldview, especially once I had found my way to the writings of Baha’u’llah.
Now I can clearly see that even back then I sensed the exclusivism implicit in the usual thinking about religion was not part of Abdu’l-Baha’s Interpretation of his father’s writings. Abdu’l-Baha’s outlook was a wide and open embrace of humanity and all the great religions. He located “The Path” in all the great faiths, without the subsequent attempts by some Baha’i denominations to claim an exclusive authority and interpretation. It was Abdu’l-Baha’s emphasis on the unity and universal truth of all the ways to the Divine Being, the Great Mystery, that attracted me and struck a deep resonance in my soul.
Filed under Universality
Follow The Globe – RSS or Atom feed. Use an RSS Reader.
