The Soft Rainbow Episodes II
1.
We turned our backs on the adulterated niceties of language,
exchanged hot air for the whiplashness of weather.
The land welcomed us, wordless. We braved it forth
like vessels bent on sailing whatever the cost
in lives or meaning. There was but the two of us,
one-manned craft on seas of independence,
no one to account to, or to cry up to either. We weren’t
spared. The land rained no favours upon us,
just water and pelting hail when such was its humour,
brute energy, crude strength. Skies drifted past like possibles
unfolded, made plain for eyes raised heavenward,
for the non-blind. We watched but did not sit.
Walked. Trudged on ground never even, bumped on
moss-hidden rock, slid on
treacherous weeds but with eyes uplifted like prayers,
not like hands, which clung to the straps of our rucksacks,
were needed in the support of these our mortal frames,
souls we were not, nor thought we’d ever be. We never quailed.
Wind and rain fought against us. Our faces froze
till our skins felt no more. Our hair stuck
to skulls we believed would burst with the storm’s uproar.
The sky did smile on us. More than once. We welcomed
the pouring light as if a well had opened in heaven
upside-down, showering warm blessings. To us,
it looked the first light that was ever rained on earth
at the beginning of the land’s history, long before men
came and stabbed dagger-words over the whole of creation
and day turned grey in the brightest of afternoons,
everyday dullness the norm. Nothing came out of this
but the temperature of vain heated brains. Comfort
held us bound for a while, whiles, lives squandered and lost
till weary with dying we took it upon ourselves to brave death,
a much lesser foe if one at all. We have endured long
in our self-decreed solitude. No one complained,
there was, is, no one for that. All the better
or nature would have turned its back on us the way we did,
an issue not to be thought of, a fear
too dreadful to face. We’re there still,
won’t stop moving about on this moor men forced upon us
and we took like a gift, not the punishment
criminals are made to suffer. Criminals we may be since we
repudiate the consumerist religion and its attendant normorality.
Refusing to compromise, refusing to die,
we became instead of fading,
will keep our course in all weathers whatever
darts the slanderous may choose to shoot.
2.
Where does truth lie ? We sought for it in each patch of light
the wayward sun showered upon us like an offering,
meant to be one and to be received as such. We did.
The oft leaden sky never deceived us with lavishness,
truth beamed down but too seldom for us to err
within castles of mazy illusion. We rushed like madmen
but where there is no one to deem you mad such things
count next to nothing. We knew offerings are brief,
mere ephemerae not meant to endure, only to flash meaning
and disappear. So we made all the speed we could despite
treacherous bogs and sudden downslumps in the level of the land,
subtleties devised to test our endurance, not to deter us,
whatever winked at us knew the winking would be seen
and quested after. Such was the motive of these callings,
trust given and fully pledged. When we reached the patches
that lay on the land like balm on slowly healing skin,
we always tried to figure out shapes in the hazy outlines
that would change ever so quick, often before the mystery
had cleared away our internal clouds, hardly less thick
than the ones within that the world sees not, while we do.
The cosmos speaks, we listen. There is no purpose in birth,
being is absurd, mechanical, accidental,
yet if it were not so,
if I and you, friend, had been made to grace a purpose,
be sure it would have been for this, to
read and rejoice, pore into the land’s arcanae
everlastingly. The cosmos is mystery and we
are its priests. We worship not with words,
the world’s means of coercion and treachery. Only
our bodies know the way they never had to learn,
ever rejoicing when they show the mettle
they know they’re made of. The moor is no end,
we shall be tested soon, that we sense with more certainty
than we ever had before our birth. Mountains are
coming though their visible stage still hasn’t come to be.
It shall. We know. The shadows spoke
plainly and loud. New shapes yet to be born,
rising land, steep valleys and chaotic hills
await us. They were fashioned for us, they are us,
what we mean, are fated to be. We must be
ready, available, keep the once rusty gates of our hearts
open for when the time comes, unconscionable though expected,
a time beyond times as mortals know them. No half-way
will rank us among the elected few. Doubt on the doorstep
remain. High on the mountain-side if not at the very summit,
truth shall be given, showered upon us like light
our eyes and skins long forgot the taste of.
We believe. We stand and wait. What our minds can’t fathom,
heaven shall reveal unto the faithful we are.
3.
Mountains ! We were not ready to face them
but then we couldn’t have been whatever our efforts,
believing we were was the thing, the source of stamina,
stubbornness and strength - death flew so close
we felt its rancid breath on our cheeks, and the salt tang
of that peculiar type of sweat let loose by fear
pricked our nostrils with bestial uncompromise. Rock
ever more rugged, slippery and bite-edged
met us with a brute’s blunt presence. Clothes
were spattered and rent. We became beggars of the wild,
gloved by solitude and the incomprehensible tenderness
that attends the wandering crazed. No one saw us
for even if there had been someone at hand,
we would have been passed by like common growths,
bushes stunted by the wind, from the soil as inseparable
as the sky from our souls. We had phased, not faded, in
to the cosmos. Our wanderings had passed beyond knowledge
as mortals know it. Not seen, talked to or (worse) about,
we simply became. We didn’t die of it
yet came so close that we looked on the surrounding fells
with the wondering eyes of one suddenly reborn
a child with a man’s wisdom but none of his bitterness.
Plateaux we found, unless we were found by them,
causality was just one of the so many trappings we had
to leave, shed like dried skin, replacing the anguish of loss
by the wideyedness of innocence, learning not to look back.
Lakes, too, jewelled our errantry. These were but
mirrors of transience, recollection of our moorbound past
and we skirted them hurriedly. We were not to loiter,
as the inner voice that motioned us on said : slopes
still awaited our chapped skins, cut wrists and mud-caked faces
and our energies, however hale, cried for haste. It
came
faster than a flashburst of lightning
in a sky we had never seen so blue.
Suddenly there was nowhere to go, nothing to climb but air.
We sat. These were the place and time.
We sat and waited till only the wind clothed us
and the dust of years no more to be had settled on our bared skins.
Clouds scurried overhead and we took the scant light they sent
like the blessing of accomplishment. Blue never returned
but as rock and air claimed us we tasted a light
far beyond a thousand suns. Sometimes we enjoy
recollecting what we used to be, fleshbound sharers of the faith
and we smile when we see ourselves on this mountain top,
lashed at by the demanding elements. We have gone else
where. Pain and place are but memory,
childadulthood’s nightmares one laughs at with joy
unalloyed. We are eternal,
in the world and beyond it. Some may glimpse us
occasionally, if their hearts will,
and wonder what it is they’ve sensed.
Let them wonder. Let them listen to their inner moors, to
the light that rains
and hides again for one to find it. Let them believe,
be.
