The Isle That Gave Me Birth

Is it just that I grow old and want to die? (Every human being must ask this question at some point.) No, the heart continues to sing its song. The song is of love and by this token it knows that it will be there when the new world rises. The new world is coming, as surely as that day in the old when the serpent first bit my heel, when I first learned to know defeat and hope in the earth. I've loved and known the old world, together with its beasts and birds, its seas and tireless mountains. I have to go back to the beginning and see the ancient Hyperborean isle that gave me birth; to the north, to feel again the cold, clear air of Polaris, when the stars first came down to receive their names. My hidden, secret history. But the new world will be born, through the tears of the old.

I feel the new world as a cocoon inside me. I see it, and hear it, in the heart's song. Will you let go of the old, as a snake sloughs its skin? The new world is not there in knowledge, which the serpent bestows. It's there in the way in which knowledge is received and given - in other words, in the human form: the being who stands with her foot above the serpent. In the transmission of love we can rise above the serpent's bite. The new world is already in and around us. It holds an end to suffering and death. But only if we become what the song sings to us. Is it possible to become the music of a song? In truth, there's nothing else you can become.

Serpent

The ancient world grows tired of living -

refreshing itself each day

in its own founts of wisdom

to give my eye the price of a new view.

It sees with imperceptible joy

the new world forming like a cocoon in me

and waits with breath held

through Platonic years

for its terrible, impressive weight

to be lifted from it. And with it

will go the four-legged creatures,

spines parallel to the earth, the birds

who've sung creation into life each day,

the seas whipped up by storm,

cold, enduring mountains left alone.

The new world will remember how

the old upheld its vow even as

that first, curling serpent bit my heel.

Jay

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