BOLD ANTIPHONY
(5)
Meditations in Contrasting Moods 
 by 
Leonard Mason 
 1912 - 1994
 Contrasting meditations are presented in pairs of poems, to represent the tensions that are 
characteristic of people open to many dimensions and options of belief.

The Well is Deep

Living water runs in the veins and cells of man;
it brings nourishment to muscle
and carries fluid signal to nerve;
it washes the brain with charged perception.

Man is athirst for the waters of the earth,
but cannot smell the spring from afar;
he follows well-worn paths of knowing beasts
and treads the tracks of human divination.

Wells that were dug by ancient man are ancient still,
their waters often stale or choked;
new man longs for fresh strikes
which bubble up from deeper sources.

Give me to drink!

It was easy to drink when rope was short
and windlass a simple drum;
but now the well is deep.
Man is athirst for knowledge
and dips into infinity.
A billion years are not enough to plumb the depth of it.

Divination has given way to precise soundings
right into the turbulent nucleus of things
where motion sprints and leaps
across orbits of inconguity.

Nevertheless, give me to drink!

Sir, you have nothing to draw with.

I have a spoon; it takes but little to satisfy me.
I can drink with my eyes and see the mote and beam.
I can drink with my brain and think my way to the stars.
I can read the saga of matter's mystery
and man's prospecting in the dark.
I taste and see the images of my own thinking
and enter into another's thirst
through the portals of his eyes.
I draw with delicacy from the living waters
and find them fresh as mountain springs,
sweet as dawnlight.

Sir, give me to drink of this living water.

So I kissed her
and both of us found a newer thirst.

 Winds on High

Prostrate he lay upon the ground,
his forehead to the dust;
until the King said, Stand!
for I also am a man.

Trembling he heard the wind in the tree-tops
and feared that it might say,
From the north come chariots against you
But the wind rode high
and spring was in its breath.

The cone of the mountain was red
and its throat muttered smoky threats.
He stood and waited for the world to end,
but when the blast came and split the air,
he found the world was just beginning.

He stood a mite beneath the stars,
and could not count their number,
because his integers ran out.
But one star fell and withered
in a spear of light;
he knew his task of reckoning
was eased by one.

He watched a single wisp of cloud evaporate
against a desert sky till there was only blue
and he was drowning in it.
But a bird wheeled and caught the light.
There were two who shared the infinite.

He drove his wagon to a scarp of rock
and through a cleft saw peaks remote
and ice-falls inaccessible.
But when he heard the chatter of a stream
chiding the low boulders of its bed,
he knew there was a way.

He rode his capsule through the changeless day
and through the unfamiliar night,
until his planet-goal loomed large
and filled the circle of his sight.
Come back! the telemeter spat,
your mission is accomplished.
He knew that he would leap again.

The greatest leap is not by rocket thrust,
or by missile untenanted by man.
He leaps the galaxies by spectrum band
and radio telescope.
He has not touched the limits yet.

It is high; I cannot attain unto it!
Yet not too high to listen
and to cogitate.

 

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