What Price The Passage Poem by Arnie Hicks

precariously poised on the bridge to comprehension,
there rests a tenuous truce, of sorts,
between the accepted world of visibility and the land of shadow;
one the elemental senses would betray the conditioned mind
were it to fail in looking past the surface of transparency.

we gather a collective breath and patiently wait
the revelation of secrets thinly veiled
in the frenzied breeding ground of rational instability;
transfixed in the resonating refrain and soul shuttering sound
that is the heart of the world.

to embrace the power of the abstract and the unknown,
even as we fear the compelling summons of approaching madness,
is to bow in deference before the innocence of humility
and the promise of hope it holds in lasting trust
for those who would be neither master nor slave to the arbitrary winds of fate.

heed the quiet call to dreams of discretionary prophecy,
for fear is best conquered in the acceptance of calculated inevitability
and the absolute abandon to time and truth's shrouded mysteries;
small the price, the invitation to reinvention,
for passage from blind complacency to the healing light of reason.