IN THE BEGINNING Sometimes simplicity rises like a blossom of fire from the white silk of your own skin. You were there in the beginning you heard the story, you heard the merciless and tender words telling you where you had to go. Exile is never easy and the journey itself leaves a bitter taste. But then when you heard that voice, you had to go. You couldn't stay by the fire, you couldn't live so close to the live flame of that compassion you had to go out in the world and make it your own so you could come back with that flame in your voice, saying listen... this warmth, this unbearable light, this fearful love... It is all here - all here. -from Fire in the Earth
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I may be wrong, but I feel that David's early poems can have a visceral simplicity that is lost in his later and more practised poems. 'In the Beginning' is one of them and it bites deed into the "pilgrim soul". Speaks of those merciless and tender words (such a meaningful contradiction) telling us where we have to go with our lives. Then the stark impact of the first word of the next stanza : Exile.... and for sure it's not going to be an easy journey. (In David's 'Leaving the Island' from The Bell and the Blackbird he speaks of "riding the long wave back/ready for the exile we call a home.") But if we hear the voice, we have no choice but to launch out into the world to embrace that flame. We cannot live comfortably beside it, just watching it. No, we must make it our own in whichever way we choose to challenge life, and when we find self, we go back home 'with that flame in your voice'. A flame that now lives within us, not close beside us. And it is all there, within, as it has been from the beginning. Into that framework every reader can surely thread her or his own journey and story. And I do like the photo with its double horizon and plume of flame rising from the white skin of the cloud.
Staring into the fire
of the burning glow of truth
Surrendering to what you love
as you slowly let it kill you
🙏❤️