The Fear Of God Poem by Michael Maxwell Steer

Fear is the golden thread that leads us into the centre of the labyrinth
where the unnameable beast lurks -
the indefinable otherness whom we must approach fearlessly.

Fear is the surest guide on this winding path,
between the icy chasms of dread and the tropical swamp of excess,
to the healing catastrophe, the overwhelming encounter -
a revelation that the universe is not the morally inert space we took it for
but an interactive environment responding precisely to how we view it:
the warp of existence following the web of our projection.

To this strange surrender … on a desert height /in the earth's throat
/in the enchanted savagery of a garden /within the tyranny of faith
or on the cold concrete of a multistorey carpark …
we are led by our own genius,
be it throu the pigsty of despair or on the wings of innocence.

Fear is sex with another name -
the cry to be held outside ourselves with nerves aflame,
transported to the high plateau where unicorns roam
and the peace of God passes understanding.
Where our deepest fears and hopes dance around the live terminals of existence
we find in that ecstatic knowing a transient alignment with the infinite.

The sweetness of certainty lies at both extremes of pleasure and pain -
ecstacy and terror both liberating the body's gravity.
At such times the 'fluence takes us, tho we may not know it,
and gold streams from our fingertips …
yet as the magic passes and the clouds lock back to frowning masks
we return to face the elements, trudging our mud-clogged cycle up the holloway.

Nowadays we flatten out the highs and lows of existence:
no need to feel cold, no need to feel hunger, no need to feel dis-ease,
no need to encounter the un/nameable otherness that might engulf us.


14/1/11