WHAT CAME BEFORE
When the mists of antiquity roll down the
mountain with what came before written history,
before the celestial irresolution of dark and light,
when persistent survival was a near miracle,
at the time when forms of worship came to be
for the earth goddess, where dreams and
the tangible world were all of the same cloth,
where distinctions, the words of separation,
had not yet found their way, every conversation
held an implicit understanding, holy-man magic, in the
same word, a light of different meanings, where all who
lived were of the same constellation, and understood.
There was, of place, a lyrical beauty to life,
and to language, as of worship, even with
an over-the-hill terror of unknown, armed men,
and nightmares with beasts no one had ever seen;
the irresolution of dark and light, thought of
together as good and evil, the torn clouds
of the heavens and the heart, the living mist,
the motion of life and the mind, the forms
of twilight and also of peace, where the law that
shall come to be, and the love by which it must
live and die, come as one down the mountain,
gentle and silent, enveloping priest and scribe.