last nights poetry, after reading DH Lawerence

I wait in a dying world.
What can a man do
while he waits in a dying world?
I wait in a dying world
with an armful of sleeping songbirds.

---

Go to sleep, child,
with a songbird in
the crook of your neck.
Sleep deep, with a purring songbird
folded against the tender skin
between throat & chin.

"Should I close my eyes
against the dark of the night?
Will it press its fingers down on me?
Will the darkness open up
and swallow me whole, even
if I am strong, and cling
to this song, feather & bone
in the sling of my throat?"

Go to sleep child,
and hold as you go, but
the world may break before you wake.
It is fragile;
thin as a new egg.

Sunday after two weekend weddings

Love drove Dante to write the Divine Comedy, & I am lovesick after two weddings - beautiful settings both of them, beautiful ladies prancing about in beautiful red gowns.
One tall bridesmaid kept looking at me & smiling, and these things are like beautiful feathered darts, you know, on hot Saturday afternoons, across hard-wood dance floors.
"Woman", I think, "You have no idea what you would be getting into."

Willamette Valley Creed

I was reading through the early creeds of the church - from the so-called Apostles Creed to the Confessions of Martin Luther. It made me want to articulate what I have come to believe. The resounding perfection in every way of the person of Jesus Christ in history and prophecy is what saves me from Deism. If you are not at least a deist you are living a lie.
"I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth..."

I have the gospel up here, oak & sunlight, words comprehended through the divine nature present in the world, and compared to my human nature. Things are a certain way - what explanation accounts? Why must I make an explanation? Why must a man account for his experience? Why do we desire to? Must we only because we desire to? Because of felt significance & meaning? Why do so many not care? Why do I care so deeply? Is our caring only voiced in different ways? Or is my caring something else voiced in this fashion? What is the basic essence of my caring about the world?

The world is beautiful, and we are self-aware, and we have language to organize and explain...

Poetry - where mind & matter find their mating.

The Representative

No, not about politics. I can never reach my mind into politics. It is so far from me - so far from a man trying to locate his body and mind in a world. I must deal with politics as one deals with the scratchy branches of a doug fir, walking into a wood.
The representative I spoke of in the title is this: every day a creature from the world of nature will announce itself to you in brilliance. For since the beginning of the world it has been like this: divine nature burning sign-form in the creatures of earth nature.
This morning I stepped from my front door at 6:15 and three scrub jays scattered through the air space of the side yard, framed with poplars and firebush branches. One of the jays lighted on our clothesline, directly in the way of a beam of clear morning sun. His small blue-gray body was sillouehetted and ringed with light.
My mind says, "oh, I'll forget". My spirit says, "The world, in its fervency, has sent another representative. We, the people of the United Fragments of the Soul of Justin, will mull this over for some time, and come back with a decision at a later date. It is never in vain that the world speaks."

Humic Songs

Finally finished the second draft on my second booklet of poetry. It clearly needs a third draft as I read through it, but it is also definitely better than the first. It is teaching me alot about what I believe concerning Human nature, and hopefully giving me insight into characteristics of our Nature which I don't understand, therefore don't believe (am I equating understanding and belief?). If you are interested in a copy, let me know.
The world is beautiful. The air has been so clean and warm this week - blue skies, light green poplar tops, fresh with young leaves. I am currently on the Cornice of the Lustful, with Virgil, Statius, and Dante. There is a discourse going on again on human nature - the coexistence of soul and body.

Out to mow the lawn.

Environmental Ethics & a Yellow Warbler

Basic premise of environmental ethics: nature is mechanistic but has intrinsic value, therefore a moral perspective can be taken when contemplating mens actions within and toward nature. Note: this belief, as you can see, falls apart on its own, and doesn't account for the value of the world.
I was cleaning moss off the awning a couple mornings ago, during a rainstorm - splashing water around with brush and bucket, as torrents of water drummed on the corrugated metal above my head. A squirrel took cover under the awning with me, gnawing on some little seed or pod on the far end of the porch.
This morning I had my first sighting of a yellow warbler. The songs of the professional songsters are so smooth and bright - like shiny gold coins falling in a heap. If you sold the song of this bird, it would be expensive.
The world is beautiful, and the machine theory just doesn't hold up - not to our own being and relationship with nature, nor does it account for the obvious worth and beauty of the world. What keeps people from understanding this? If you think the world is beautiful, if you love creatures specifically, then you are believing tacitly in something more than a random cause and effect machine. You are believing in a designed creation. Be a deist with Antony Flew, but don't kill your own spirit by saying that none of it is real but only matter in motion, and any significance, or particularity, or sense of being and meaning that we feel towards anything is only an illusion for the good of evolution. The little warbler was singing on the branch before I came - he had his own existence there, separate from the branch, bending the air with waves of sparkling sound, before I was there - I did not cause, in my mind, an illusion of his distinct existence. In mechanistic evolution, he and all significant particulars are illusions. Yes, he will be swallowed up into the earth again in not too much time - but for now, magic!, he has been raised up from the grave and sings with his particular brand of birdish personhood.

Firefox & The Beauty of Ideas

Well, I finally switched this computer over to Firefox, so I can once again begin posting. Blogger and Opera are not on friendly terms.
Been thinking about the whole Antony Flew conversion this morning... read a new article about it, his intellectual process, "following the evidence, like Socrates" he says. I am convinced that we are not convinced by reason - rather, that I am not convinced by powerful reasoning, but rather by submission in my soul to ideas. I am neither convinced nor unconvinced by reasoning - instead I stand gaping with abuliac shock at the pearly gates of heaven and earth - to make a step I must submit. What makes a man step one way or another? Dante's two or three discourses on free will in Purgatory by Virgil and some pentient soul in the cornice of the Wrathful have been milling about in my head since last night, and I am excited. Excited because no matter how depressing and heavy they can be, ideas are very beautiful, especially when they hang like stars in your mind above the perfect landscape of space and time.