ETERNITY'S FACE

 

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A few years ago, Paul Dear and I were paired to collaborate on a poem at Imaginary Garden With Real Toads, a most inspiring writing site, where many of us wrote together for years. (I do miss Toads.)  I was remembering that poem today and thought I would post it, in honor of April Poetry Month, along with our discussion of our process in putting it together. Here is the link to the original post.

ETERNITY’S FACE

Into the dark I move.
Arms out, eyes blind for now.
Feeling for the way ahead
with feet and with hands.

Use caution, wayfarer.
This way, there be dragons.
Who sent you journeying?
What is it that you seek?
Do you have a question for
Wild Woman of the woods?

My senses are my caution
and dragons I have met and slayed.
I answered my own call
and so seek only truth.
This question I ask of you.
What is it makes you wild?

It is the song of the sea,
the howl of a wolf, the way a tree
tells herself to me.
It's the beat of the drum,
my heart's answering thrum.
It's the ancestors speaking
inside of me.
How does the land speak to you,
fellow pilgrim?
What secrets whisper to you
on the wind?

This land speaks to me with a voice
older than time itself.
An elemental whisper of the aes sidhe
carries itself within my soul
and sings to me of the temporal nature
of things.
I walk here now in the green.
I will also be gone
and only an echo remain.
What lies beyond oh wild woman?

I have peeked up and over
the brow of the hill
on the way to Eternity.
The ancients, ululating
a welcome song,
beckoned me with gnarled fingers.
I tried not to see.
There was a barren desert beyond,
and a river.
I heard the ferryman paddling
around the bend,
singing as he came for me.
Then I came back into my body.
Not time yet. Not yet.

Then it comes clear, my task
and the source of my beckoning.
I am to walk beyond the veil
into the land of my ancestors.
Into the ferryman's boat must I go
and across the great river,
and you, wild woman of the woods,
you must guide me there.

Death is that river, turbulent,
catching us up and
roaring us through rock-walled chasms,
green with weeping.
It plunges us into the maelstrom,
dashing us onto the rocks
so eagles may feed.

It swirls us 'round, then settles us,
lighter, and relieved of our earthly burden,
in peaceful ponds along the shore,
where coyote and wolf
may find us.

I will meet you there at twilight
on the last day.

Well met it is then and will be on that last day.
I am all swept up in that turbulence now.
Those eddies spin me beyond any idea of retreat.
So it is then that I must loosen this blanket of life,
so that in death I may come to the answer I seek,
that final truth which calls me across the waters,
and it is the knowing that I must die and relinquish
all which bears me forward to face my own face,
born and dead.

Part II

I am dead. It is done.
I have crossed over the water’s threshold.
Life exists only on a distant shore now
and here a dark unknown surrounds me.
My faith was strong enough to leap but
now my heart crumbles and I am alone
with this void, this fear and an echo of my life.
Silent tears call out in vain. Where now?

Traveler, when there is no path,
the Way is the path.
Turn your face towards the void;
seek a glimmer of light.
In trust, we walked our earthly shore,
and now our quest is to discover
something More.

These words torment my mind.
Zen circles that spin me endlessly.
The void is all there is.
How can I face all ways at once?
My faith is lost and with it all trust.
Damned I am to dwell in darkness.
If the way is the path then my path
is to nowhere. I am lost.

Traveler, you are All Soul now.
Spirit sees in all directions
and will find its way.
Listen into the Wind.
Somewhere, there is an opening.
When you find it, you must enter,
for there is no going back.

Then darkness is my opening
and in that I now see the light.
I am made of nothing and of everything.
I am the wind and the space
into which it must blow.
I am the question and the answer.
I am life and death.
That one face, born and dead.


                  ***

When our names were first paired, I was intrigued. Paul and I didn’t know each other well, and our styles are very different. I expected our exercise would be interesting, but I think we were both somewhat astonished at how easily it came together, and the direction it took. We plunged deep.

The tandem idea was always interesting to me and Sherry sent an email that landed when I was delivering a training program in Kuala Lumpur. Sherry and I had not had much contact other than poem comments and so this was a blind date of sorts. There followed a short email conversation and finally after some gentle nudging I sat down to write when I landed back in the UK. I was jet lagged and unsure about how to proceed so I began where I was. In the dark.

The beginning was open enough that it left me a lot of scope for a reply. And then the poem just took off.

We enjoyed this exercise so much that, once we reached what we thought was the end of the poem, we continued the conversation a bit further in Part II.

Paul: I was happy to begin the tandem poem as I tend to work very often from a place of ‘not knowing’ what is going to come when I write. Beginning felt natural. Then it was really just a statement of where I was in the process. In the Dark.

Sherry: When I received your first stanza, it left me wide open to respond and, instantly, the words began to flow. My Wild Woman persona showed up right on time, and began to speak. I just stepped out of the way.

Paul: Here the door opens to the poem. Now I’m on a journey and am quizzed about my motivation. In response I have to learn more about this Wild Woman. Who she is and what she is made of? Her answers evoke myth in me and ancestral voices. I mention the 'aes sidhe' who I have encountered in Irish mythology (my own heritage). This ancient race and our connection to the Earth are interwoven into my own story and so the idea brews now in my head of the ‘otherside,' the land beneath the sidhe, the otherworld. So I ask that question at the end of the stanza.

Sherry: I am of Irish heritage as well. Your reference to the “ancestral voices” spoke to me. That question was a great hook for me, as I have contemplated death and eternity many times in my work these recent years, when time is ever more finite. It was a pivotal question in the direction the poem took. Wild Woman was in full roar now, and I waited with anticipation to see what your character would say, and how she would respond. For it was clearly Wild Woman at the keyboard, and not me. Smiles.

Paul: It gets interesting here because the response lines up with the feeling that had been evoked in me earlier, and I now see that a threshold is present and must be crossed.

Sherry: Paul, I am curious about your closing line in Part I, the “facing your own face, born and dead”. Can you explain a bit about that?

Paul: Sometimes when I write a line I have no idea what it fully means. It just sounds or feels right. Later meaning may come. With this line that was very much the same. I remember thinking 'what do I really mean here?' Then you actually asked me!

After some thought and a little exploration of a few myths that were brought into a more conscious view, I think that this line for me is looking at the idea of Katabasis.

Born is where I am at this point....at the threshold....Dead is where I must go to find 'that other', be it a person or, as it turns out, an ‘awareness’.

Sherry: It reminds me of the Buddhist teachings about our “original face”, the one we had before we were born. I assume this is the face we reclaim after death, the Soul-face or Being that is our eternal essence, in life and in death, throughout our many lives.

It was with astonishment that I watched this poem become a journey into death and beyond. It was quite magical. It soon seemed necessary to both of us to continue with a Part II. One cannot leave a journey incomplete.

Paul: I agree. Part II wrote itself out of need. The whole process of exploring the unknown only to discover we were looking at life and death was incredible. The writing of the poem mirrored the journey we wrote about. For me, in the context of the final piece, death was a liberation, complete and total, and whilst we talked about a possible part III, a return of some kind, I felt that the final stanza was final and Sherry concurred. There was nowhere to return from...or to.