Poem For My Birthday Poem by Michael Maxwell Steer

Within the body of a man,
greying and overweight,
there lives the soul of a singing child
following the opus dei
in a winter-dark cathedral,
standing in cassock and surplice -
a pool of light just holding at bay
the echoing fall of night.

Already adrift on the world's high sea
I read my inner sky
and, clutching my psalter like a raft,
detect an approaching storm,
ignorant of what precautions
might preserve my life.
Yet here were lines of verse like spars
of wood that I could cling to:

"Keep innocency, and take heed
to the thing that is right:
for that shall bring a man peace at the last."
Amid the jostling waves
I have trusted to that as a shipwrecked man
clutches a floating chair,
his fingers barely grasping it -
knowing the presence of death,
and from that dark encounter drawing
a joy transcending time and space.

"I have been young and now am old,
yet never saw I the righteous
forsaken, nor his seed begging
their bread." Pious words -
not true, alas, but yet expressing
a dynamic of integration,
the wish to believe that all can be well.
Still, if we see life's arc
extending beyond the physical sphere
then is there human language
to convey the supra-rational
truth of redemptive suffering?

And so at last the storm subsided
and I, in a different body,
was cast upon a foreign shore.
Staggering up the beach
I looked in awe to see I held
a fragment of the true cross,
saved from the wreckage of the world.
Looking at what is old

we see what's new: looking afresh at
new we trace the old.
Perhaps the storm is its own crucible
melting the soul's components
til its polarities con-fuse
micro- and macrocosm?
Is that what's meant by ‘peace at last'
(+ marks the spot)
the invisible coordinate
each of us must find?

If war is the harmonic clash
between two nations' inner
discords, what can we say of peace -
Merely the absence of war?
Or is it the macrocosmic resonance
of microcosmic harmony?
Are we yet ready for Fox's percept:
"I stand in the knowledge of Christ Jesus
that taketh away occasion for war"? -
a precipice of faith
too high to climb: or an escarpment
offering magnificent views?

Within that chanting boy these currents
surged, not yet full strength,
buffeting him along a spectrum
from inarticulacy
to despair that rendered ambition
too trivial a goal.

Search for the golden meaning is each one's
search for their own true name:
uncovering our unique gift is uncovering
what we can give to life.
Here again the cross, inner
and outer: neither sufficient
but each requiring heat to solder
a lattice for the current
of duality to flow
animating life,
activating transcendence
in everyday existence.

Look now at the glowing disc of dawn:
hear the open-throated
praise of life by nature's chorus.
Simple acquiescence
gives rite of entry to the pageant.
Embracing light,
the price and prize is loss of ego
in a greater self.

In this dawn, reconnecting
to my spirit child
I feel the power to choose return
allowing release from
patterns of returning hurt;
wounds forever new
yet now transformed from blood to oil …
the mystery of the grail.

I embrace in you my friend
who I was, and who
I must become: just as in me
you see who I am not.
The child is father to the man:
if this were clearly seen
how would it alter education!
Here is not ‘innocence',
but rather a veil of flesh which spirit
must slowly ease away.
Do not see the two opposed,
the greatest human glory
lies in fusing sex and spirit.
Yet also all abuse.

Newtonian lore declares that where
we find the greatest light
we also find the greatest dark.
The human psyche a
taigetu, where increasing yang
expands the hidden yin.

That child had not yet seen "the ungodly
flourishing like a bay tree",
admired by all: this adult has -
yet empires of the heart,
the rise and fall of public figures,
requires no explanation.
"I went by and lo he was gone -
his place was nowhere found."

Where are they who once absorbed
our every waking thought?
Stars who burned in our mid heaven
yet did not turn with our turning
world; or music, once life's soundtrack,
quaint and impotent
revisited in later years.
So much for human empires!

"The heart knows its own joys best: nor can
another know its pain."
The urbanity of Anglican chant's
a strange accompaniment
for the psalmist's ecstatic highs
and suicidal lows.
What sense do we have of his savage life
in murderous terrain,
when well-bred English men and boys
repeat in fluting tones
these passionate words in the passionless calm
of stained glass windows?

And yet, inexplicable irony,
tho the furnace of human
emotions fades: its distillation,
which is art, survives.


18/11/2008 My 63rd birthday