A Personal Vision Poem by Daniel Brick

We have lost the cosmos. The sun strengthens us no more,
neither does the moon... Now we have to get back the
cosmos, and it can't be done by a trick. The great range
of responses that have fallen dead in us have to come to
life again.
from APOCALYPSE by D. H. Lawrence

The time, we say, is ripe...
and we see that ripeness everywhere:
the fruit filled with juice, a day
approaching its apogee, a storm
threatening coastal cities, a star
aging toward implosion. So the moment
arrives and what cannot be postponed,
occurs. I suppose trying to ignore
this moment is futile, and diminishing
its importance is beyond my ability, but
to simply wait as this future moment
and its convulsive beauty looms before me
and an invisible clock closes the distance
between myself and its arrival is unbearable,
which is to say, it is inhuman.

I am only a single voice, but that
in itself is more than one. Each time
I speak I lodge that voice into the mesh
of things. It cannot be ignored
by other beings, or other things. So -
when the fruit falls, when day darkens into night,
when the storm is averted, when a star is
reduced to star-dust, time fulfills its
mission, and I record time's precise and
thorough action. Time loses its mystery
for me in such fateful moments: it becomes
just another blind force in a universe that
worships force. Oh, when will one of
the higher beings descend to intervene
and impose a peaceful poise in our world?

Imagine a universe of stillness:
when time collapses into eternity, change
stops wearing new masks to hide the monotony
of its endless cycle of the same events
year after year, when Good detaches Evil
from its nature, and presides over
the withering of its deflated being.
And the Sun and the Moon shower us with
spiritual light in all our times. And
the prophecies of the END TIME will be
fulfilled without the violence our seers
could not reason past. Instead of destruction,
there will be something like a whisper
rushing through the space of our new existence,
confiding in our hearts, Fear not. Be at peace.