The Archeology of the Mind

Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem

“The deeper and more intimate a spiritual communion, the more readily it dispenses with signs and linkages through waking consciousness.  A real comradeship makes itself understood with few words, a real faith is silent altogether.”  ~ Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, chapter V.

The priests and prophets all despite their dreams

Ignored the depths inside their minds.  They failed,

These seers, failed to see.  Instead each seems

To reckon God and all that guff had trailed

In glory everything of note.  “See, see

Where Christ’s blood streams” is what they find.

They do not look to their unconscious.  Free

Of knowledge of themselves they, groping, blind

To inner truth, “think” they have heard from God.

On this presumption they lash out, each man

(And woman) telling us what God has awed

Them with, these eyeless clowns of Hindustan.

  Saints Freud and Jung went charging to the fore.

    The prophets turn blind eyes to each man’s core.

 

Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas and On and On are Off

Some pre-suppose that there are spirit things,

Like souls and seraphs, also God.

Supposers of this sort imagine wings

In heaven—God knows where else.  It is odd

That such have never given proof of stuff

Like this.  Supposers of this sacred ilk

Think writing on their parchment guff,

Unproven, pre-suppose that they can bilk

Us into unfact faiths.  Minds presume

That we are desperate to believe untruths

Because of death.  Supposers thus assume

That we should turn away from maids and youths.

  I say to these pretenders, flee to book

    And leave us.  We do not love crooks.

~ Phillip Whidden