shanti, shanti, shanti

  

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Between two musical notes there exists another note, between two facts there exists another fact, between two grains of sand, no matter how close together they are, there exists an interval of space, there exists a sensing between sensing—in the interstices of primordial matter there is the mysterious, fiery line that is the world’s breathing, and the world’s continual breathing is what we hear and call silence.

—Clarice Lispector

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I am the dream changing before your eyes. 

I am my body, a house for blood and breath. 

I am a man on earth and a god in heaven. 

While I travel the deserts in frail form, while I grow old and weep and die, I live always as a child inside the body of truth, a blue egg that rocks in the storm but never breaks. 

I sleep in peace in my mother’s lap, a child mesmerised by sunlight on the river. My soul is swallowed up by God.

Out of chaos came the light.

Out of the will came life.

—The Egyptian Book of the Dead

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The earth turned to bring us closer,
it spun on itself and within us,
and finally joined us together in this dream
as written in the Symposium.

Nights passed by, snowfalls and solstices;
time passed in minutes and millennia.
An ox cart that was on its way to Nineveh
arrived in Nebraska.

A rooster was singing some distance from the world,
in one of the thousand pre-lives of our fathers.
The earth was spinning with its music
carrying us on board;

it didn't stop turning a single moment
as if so much love, so much that's miraculous
was only an adagio written long ago
in the Symposium's score.


—Eugenio Montejo
Peter Boyle version

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