Into The Flow Of Time A Miracle Poem by Michael Maxwell Steer

When the everyday miracle, love, strikes
all the resonant chords within us chime
and even the tawdry ruts of likes and dislikes
dissolve into harmonies of rhyme.

So it is in reverse when the heart's vibration
ceases for a while identification
with the body, allowing the soul to fly,
and from its high position gain perspective -
answering the million riddles ‘why? '
and showing much we cherish as defective.

At times like these - and in the man-made miracles
of telephony, medicine, power and transportation -
is transcendence seen; not abrogation,
revealing a further summit behind each pinnacle
we had thought for years the highest good -
showing just how little was understood.

Thus, into the flow of time a miracle
comes as a momentary reversal
or scattering of coherence, in response
to the force field of a person's intense
longing, raising hir focus to a flame
which burns throu logic and the layers of time
to a quantum reality, where
Will magnetises Matter and where
the fixed Newtonian laws yield their place
to the liberal magic of the lore of grace.

Transcending reason's like finding in a wall
the secret mechanism of a door
which, knowing or unknowing, swings aside
to reveal undreamed of vistas, wide
as faith, torrential as love, deep as the sky
that within the instant form eternity.
There implosion and explosion are one -
sudden galaxies forming round a sun
where seconds before was swirling gas
(and which in as many million millions pass
away like a magician's trick)in more dimensions
than we have powers of imagination.

But here's the twist: this secret mechanism
(invisible to rational eyes, a prism
refracting primordial energy into matter)
dances ever before us reflected on water
yet is for ever beyond us - for to grasp
it is to find mere fluid within our clasp.
Found of them that sought it not - the key-
hole eludes all but the noiseless key.

The priest before the altar may not see
the very forms he celebrates as mystery.
Yet as a playing child may find the plant
a learnèd botanist has vainly sought,
so ‘the cloud of unknowing' clarifies
rarely (not to committees of the wise,
never to materialistic science,
nor can any court compel compliance) :
but simply to ripeness; the ripeness of the heart,
the invisible organic processes which start
with the simple yesss! that only a child
and those approaching death may truly speak
(the one as yet unschooled in ways of guile
the other calm, with nothing left to seek)
whose deeper meaning lies beyond desire,
irrelevant to those whose trade is power,
glimpsed in marriage, if often masked by care,
unseen, yet incandescent everywhere.

Why then, tell me, does fruit burst throu the bough?
If you understand that, then see how
ripeness and timing are nature's master clocks
which, driven by intensity, unlock
the giving power of love we name as God -
that orgasmic force within the heart,
the yearning beyond the strength of human wishes
to whose transforming gift the only answer is
‘thy will be done' - ecce ancilla domini,
the gift of freedom to the free;
a release from self-centred purposelessness
into the heart's true channel to express
the extra-ordinary revolution
that love empowers as evolution.

This, my friend, this is the miracle
worth breaking into programmes on the air
to announce, yet how typical
that we record such cataclysms nowhere.
The oldest riddle in the world which must
be solved afresh by all, each step of trust
along an ancient path the first one ever
taken, tho each in doing something new
is following a pattern to their truth
which flows afresh each time yet alters never.

The only possible response to this
is open-hearted gratitude that springs
which flowed for distant ancestors still flow
today, noticed or unnoticed, and show
no hesitancy or hint of slackening
in bringing water to our thirsty lips.
Some see in this life-giving work a unique
figure, calling all the world to seek
a single path in Christ, Mahomet, Buddha,
Sai Baba, Moses or LaoTse; but if a
single truth there is, what else could
it be but in acknowledging the good
these many prophets do, while seeing in each
the One, and in one the All, for this they teach.

So do not claim me for your God: for mine's
much smaller, yet if we together place
each glimpse of God we'll find the collage shine
and in it see beyond the human face
which we've constructed into a loving, trusting
darkness within whose permissive space
all are healed of hurt or harm by lasting
transformation, and even the hopeless case
long since despaired of glows afresh and stutters
words of love uneasily. Yet uttered
once the tongue finds them no longer strange
and thus, precursor to a greater change,
begins to find itself within a range
of novel possibilities where freedom
ceases to be a vacant ad-land word
flashing coldly on a vacant billboard
but becomes instead peopled and warm
within the discipline of co-creation,
building, as inly-led, a work or nation.

O you whom I call Lord, my inmost heart,
take from me fear which blocks out love, and plant
instead the quiet seed of listening,
that I, cherishing your word above all sound
and as an instrument of peace, may bring
to the world an echo of the miracle found
in the re-sounding of each sacred chant,
creating the whole whereof we are but part.

15 December 2000