Becoming of the Phoenix
I flew straight out of heaven,
a mad bird full of secrets. I came into being as I came in to being.
I grew as I grew. I changed as I changed. My mind is fire, my soul fire.
The cobra wakes and spits fire in my eyes. I rise through ochre smoke into
black air enclosed in a shower of stars. I am what I have made. I am the
seed of every God, beautiful as evening, hard as light.
I am the last four days of yesterday, four screams from the edges
of earth- beauty, terror, truth, madness-the phoenix on her pyre.
In a willow I made
my nest of flowers and snakes, sandalwood and myrrh. I am waiting for
eternity. I’m waiting for four hundred years to pass
before I dance on flame, turn this desert to ash, before I rise,
waking from gold and purple dreams into season of God. I will live
forever in the fire spun from my own wings. I’ll suffer burns that burn
to heal. I destroy and create myself like the sun that
rises burning from the east and dies burning in the west. To
know the fire, I become the fire. I am power. I am light. I am forever.
On the earth and in heaven I am. This is my body, my work. This is my deliverance.
The heat of transformation
is unbearable, yet change is necessary. It burns up the useless, the diseased.
Time is a cool liquid; it flows away like a river. We shall see no end
of it.
Generation after
generation, I create myself. It is never easy. Long nights I waited,
lost in myself, considering the stars.
I wage a battle against darkness, against
my own ignorance, my resistance to
change, my sentimental love for my own folly. Perfection is
difficult task. I lose and find my way over again. One task done gives
rise to others. There is no end to the work left to do. That is harsh eternity.
There is no end to becoming. I live forever striving for perfection. I
praise the moment I die in fore for the veils of illusion burn
with me. I see how hard we strive for truth, and once attained, how
easily we forget it. I hold that fire as long as I can.
My nose fills with the smell of seared flesh, the acrid smoke of death,
so that years from now I might look on that scar and remember how
it was to hold the light, how it was to die and come again radiant as light
walking on sand.
I changed and change again,
generation after generation. I find anguish then peace.
I am satisfied
with my birth and the fate to which it led me. I do not regret the
discomforts and terrors of my mortality
any more that I regret the company of angels.
I have entered fire. I become invisible; yet I breathe in the
flow of sun, in the eyes of children, in the light that
animates the white cliffs at dawn. I am God in
the world in everything, even darkness. If you have not seen
me there, you have not looked. I am the fire that burns
you, that burns in you. To live is to die a thousand deaths,
but there is only one fire, one eternity!
