THE LADDER OF VIRTUE
When climbing virtue’s ladder, your first rung
Is learning to attend to others’ needs;
The second is to care for those among
Them by performing charitable deeds
Which you do out of sympathy,
A fellow-feeling vibrant in your heart
That graduates in time to empathy,
Which signifies you are no more apart
But one, now sharing an identity.
*
AKASHA
In time I’ll go to the Akashic Zone,
Returning to that plenum whence I came,
Where I can reckon how my mind has grown,
Which is the holy goal toward which we aim
When we shall ultimately realize
The purpose of a planet like this Earth:
Creating beings who at last grow wise
And recognize the cosmic plenum’s worth,
Self-conscious then in an exalted way,
Aware of our supreme identity,
The grandeur of the cosmic role we play,
And sated in our curiosity,
For then we’ll know the purpose of it all
Uplifted from our sad primordial Fall.
*
TOWARD A NEW AGE
“The glory, jest and riddle of the world”—
So Alexander Pope once summed us up,
“Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl’d”
Saintly at times, but oftener corrupt.
For all the wonders of our brains’ invention
That have indeed propelled us into space,
We’re rarely pure in our intention
And, like as not, we plunge into disgrace.
While many strive to lift humanity
To lofty eminence through worthy deeds,
We suffer from innate insanity,
And so it’s rare such holiness succeeds.
While many now envision a New Age,
It’s only via love we’ll reach that stage.
*
MY PRACTICE
What is there better I can do than make
A daily verse and exercise my gift
And skill “for heaven and the future’s sake”
(As Frost once wrote): for joy and for uplift?
For that, it must be musical and chime,
Depicting in apt imagery fresh sights,
And when there’s charming rhythm and apt rhyme
There grows a poetry that most delights.
Free verse and prose have their own merits, true,
But I’ve an aptitude for this old kind
And feel the happiest when I pursue
A style where sound and sense are intertwined,
For such a verse has more vivacity
And lodges longer in your memory.
P.S. This poem is not one of those
As you correctly will suppose.
*
AUBADE II
It’s not as though there’s nothing new to say
And that in writing poems I’ve said it all,
As I have demonstrated every day
By answering my eager Muse’s call,
For sitting, musing, much comes to my mind,
New themes and novel topics to explore
From which a sonnet’s form may be designed
To say what I have never said before.
Each poem begun becomes an eager quest
To find how sound and sense may best cohere,
And when they do, I feel profoundly blessed
As what I’m aiming to find out grows clear.
The couplet at the end serves to conclude
‘Twixt night and day, my morning’s interlude.
*
FLOURISHING
for Daniel R. DeNicola
The Spirit, Soul or Essence that is life,
That animation with which we are rife,
Throughout the Cosmos seems the most profound
Of all the spatial wonders that abound.
But that we randomly occurred by blind
Coincidence, instead of being designed
By some implicit Mind, seems most absurd:
A conscious cosmic Source must be inferred.
If that be so, then we must wonder why
We have, and what directives may apply
Implicit in our cosmic consciousness
Prescribing the design for our success,
Assuming, then, we’re an experiment,
Let’s say that flourishing is our intent.
*
THE LONGEST STRIDE
What should the next advance be for our race
But to eradicate our first disgrace
Since we have suffered long for that betrayal
Forsaking Eden for this earthly jail?
The hope that Paradise might be regained
Once we our innate evils have restrained
To which from the beginning we’ve been prone,
Then our long adolescent stage outgrown—
Inspires us to take our longest stride
Past envy, anger, gluttony and pride
As well as lechery and sloth and greed,
For then indeed we may at last proceed
To build a world of sanity and love,
According to the plan of God above.
*
