! ! What She Told Me Poem by Michael Shepherd

Arrived at last at the monastery
she listened as he asked

why are your aspirations so very puny?
why do you not aspire
to be liberated for the sake
of all mankind?

and, she said, she could
have cut the silence with a sword;

the two-edged sword, of unreason
and of reason; the same light
flashing from the hero’s sword
or burning steady, gentle, from the candle
there in the temple of the heart.