To My Daughters Poem by Michael Galvin

I
The time you once took to counsel
the puzzle of your faces
is redeemed in another mirror.

Be kind to yourself:
remember our game of getting warmer?
You are so much closer.

Do not shield yourself from experience,
nor be passive to all impressions;
and never deride your precious body from its appointment
with the body of your self.
The soul has many midwives: want nothing and you shall be unpossessed.

Do not ask the name and place of the fire
advising the namelessness of love,
knowing no other than its universal self,
vivified outside of time, inside itself inside of you,
the holy kindness hidden only from the hidden.

Do not doubt we hide, and most from the void of ourselves;
we hide so much we hide from hiding.
We hide in our televisions,
we hide in our newspapers,
we hide in our public transport,
we hide in our best wishes,
we hide in our privacies,
in our Christs, our Buddhas, our Krishnas and Allahs;

evading the absence of news in the news,
the absence of movement in movement,
the absence of knowledge in knowledge,
until the way we live becomes an evasion of the way we live.

II
I dreamt the Devil sold Eve to the world
blindfold and wrapped in ropes right under God's nose,
and the people's acceptance of her blindness
condemned their days to blind flesh
living inside sleeping Adam's carcass,
searching for the light love of which we are inheritors.
We untie Eve's rope and blindfold to receive our birthright,
as we draw thorns from our hands beside the rose,
knowing there is no work required other than that which consciously
joins the abundance of the spiritual earth we cannot take,
assume or conquer. We can only be still enough to receive.

To spiritual earth, the fulfilment of this,
the pipes and circuits in the body plumb their purpose,
and grace may permit absence to see itself,
as no more nor less the shadow proposed to the world
in the same way the Devil proposed his mediated Eve,
in premature foreclosure of the Self
intended for discovery in the purchase of surrender.

III
Beginners have many friends.
Those who know what they have heard move among fewer,
in schools provided by the wilderness for older
beginners to explore their holy nova.
Some arrive with inflated references tucked in their bibs,
others have blades hidden in their mother's gloves,
or shields tied by fathers to their backs.
It's always the same before revision -
the poverty of their prior knowledge
is wholly known by an emergence in another world
no different from this, but more wholly human,
enacting creation as if God's finger's just lifted,
and the world's a footpath claiming
God Was Here. Always here, in our only earth.
The best cure of inflated birth is the honest wife, unbinding Eve.

IV
Avoid anyone who claims they can show you God;
if their God has a name, they will not be the God you find.
I guarantee you will not find any God by any of those names.
I guarantee you will find a presence which inhabits
every particle of your body, your mind and your heart,
as you likewise inhabit that divine portion inhabiting you.
I guarantee you will know forgiveness of yourself in ways revealing
who the enemy we must love most truly is,
and this will be a mercy undeserved even had you broken
open in the most inconsolable privacy,
in the perfect accident of grace.
God is when God is not a concept but a living unknown,
as you are known by the living.

I have no autograph of God that you can prove;
the holy one germinates in every spring,
yet their bag is empty of the stethoscope piping
the heart to the ears with which the sky listens.

V
In my quiet I chuckle at the loving superfluity of this moment;
be ease with yourself and the movement of your body, and the movement in yourself, from the beginning
previous to thought, to the flowing expression of action
appropriate and direct, plumbing yourself, finding no doubt,
an earth void of hidden depths, a sphere of completion
in a self which until this hour had no substantial edifice to ratify
a single circumstance.

Seek to build upon the good;
a word of good is good always, equally benevolent
in the knowing voice and the thirsty ear,
sharing the same foundation as the tool fit for the purpose of carving
headway into the unsounded sea and all it launches, and all
it launches into itself in the hour of its acceptance.

We share witness, and sharing witness,
open the shoulders of an Atlas in which we see
the world of privacy conquered by examination
in a light no one but the conquered know,
finding their phantom pain was but a blind defense
against a phantom negligence.

Am I leading where you will follow me?
There is a lighthouse and a keeper of the Holy Ghost;
I was, I am, and I become the burnt and scalloped promontory
blowing back the sea's wild sprays with inarticulate joy,
because the solid mediation of the harbour they seek
finds harbour in the blessing of their love.
Yes, I will answer; there is no destination other than living
where we heard the commandment fulfilling love.

VI
I have been encouraged, and you will be encouraged.
The gifts I made to celebrate the world before it found
the empty wound I hid, are rediscovered
roaring with the sun,
fresh as the morning they were born.
I cornered the limited utility of books;
I replayed music of unlimited joy;
I wrote the diary of a poet in loose leaf, and the wind blew.
I cannot do otherwise than accept my inheritance of the blood
running in your veins; a trusting cup of faith the hands
raising me to drink are those of love.

I believe I will somehow grow old, and your hands will raise me.

VII
There is a balance in the opening and closing of things,
ensuring life contains no emptiness;
an end's transformed into beginning, an exit to an entry.
Substance always flows between relative voids
in the world's mechanical progress.

Our emptiness is the emptiness of scarecrows
walking on the stalk-sawn wind for a shadow to yield reply.
They walk while the winds saws on, but no farmer
comes to clasp the swollen shoulder to commend;
no one shakes the empty glove to indicate the mirror
standing in the field has grown the ears to hear the world
in any other way, than as reflections of their emptiness.

Until the beginning no sound comes.
Until the beginning the sun's inverted pendulum drains,
and the wind saws on. The air so lightly worn,
so lightly fallen from the sky, redeems an iron
age for the sparrow watching through the grill.

VIII
And then a simple thing - a moth in a descending spiral from the moon -
may brush the knuckle of a finger with metallic dust,
brush the quiet in a cricket’s bell rising from the dark,
and remind the echo in the trembling stars of a destination
joining the invention of the morning.