The Newburghers Poem by George Tally

Dawn

The Realization
Came like a dawn,
Overall,
For all eyes to see.

What a word, is realization!
Does it make its object real?
No. It is only subjective;
And yet it is
The near bridgehead
And essence of revelation.

The broadest dawn it was.
In ‘customed silence led,
By nearest hues advanced,
And, like solar dawns,
Ascribed to single moments,
Somewhat past their inklings,
Which astronomers then assign
And historians debate.

The realization,
Like all dawns,
Came not with new light,
But first, the fading of old stars.
A sense of darking,
Before the light.

The sense of passing of our stars,
On which all reckoning was built,
Gave presentiment before light,
And inner watch a pause.

What is that sense,
Not of the senses,
Of impending realization?
Night's sands wiped from eyes?
A momentary tickle?
Perhaps to shunt from further notice?
Having come unbidden?
And unwelcome?
Perhaps an aeon of its own;
An epoch in the twilight zone.

Too brief are solar dawnings
To give us to reflect.
But an immense dawn,
One unique,
May well stage, first,
A wondering.

Such a pause was this.
Swelling long,
Disturbing thought,
Before finally broaching it.
The realization so great,
Its foreboding was a summoning.

Widespread anticipation,
Eluding reason, abstractly,
And history, obliquely.
And coming,
None conceived it fullness,
But all were swept along.

And, like days' dawns,
Its light was not upon itself,
But upon all that's seen.

This, then, tells the story,
Of the dawning and the dawn,
And forecasts a zenith,
For ours and all to come

Now, metamorphosis:
Realization advancing into day,
And orphan men's becoming Man.

Waking

Newburghers take their name
From Klempt Von Newburgh,
The first to show,
From DNA alone,
That the Family lives;
The distinct being
Of which each of us is part.

DNA had once been thought
A thing of separate selves.
For the science, then,
Could not conceive
True meta being -
Our extended self.

But when DNA was charted
Across many lives,
In the space of new math,
Its collusions were compelling.

The scattered thread's potential
As much greater than one's own,
As his is above its separate atoms;
And Man's potential,
As much greater than men's,
As men's are above Nothingness;

An archipelago of radicals,
In disparate accord,
Bearing Man, himself,
Upon this world.

Our fathers had felt alone,
So they could scarce conceive,
They were parts of something bigger;
And, for it, no less individuals,
But even more again as members.

This is no academic construct,
But more concrete than ever
Our separate selves had seemed.

As a liver quickly dies,
Outside the organs' family,
Individual selves had died
Without The Family.

Never knowing why,
Curling, writhing bodies,
Man's affairs did brew.
A molten stew of cells
Churning history;
Replicating parts,
But never walking whole.
Till Newburgh's realization.

When, in that light,
Our fathers saw the lure
The network held for some,
They guessed it was some face
Of the thing itself,
Its contents and modes of use.

So Ptolemaic structures
Of psyche and the nous
Were built. Whole schools
To count The Family phantom
As itself a construct;
A projection of each self
Upon an abstract many;
Mere side effects of networked ones,
In large, chaotic, lots.
Rather than the opposite.

In wary premonitions,
Some came to fear
The emerging implications.
From that atomic vision
Of competing selves,
Its attraction seemed unlikely,
Dark, an error.

So ever more arcane
And tortuous theories
Were made to tell,
But, for their obscurity,
Wore quickly thin.

A sense of The Family
Dawned vague in every man.
And as this new sense brewed,
In crescendoing accord,
The meme augured an arrival.

Was it the dawning,
In our former minds,
True sense of The Family,
Or The Family itself,
That impelled the flowing waking?

One cannot tell the seas in life,
From waves of his own making
Though, mostly, they prevail.

The sea, the dawn, the metaphor,
Took life and was upon us.
A few learned at first,
Then more and more,
No metaphor,
No more than any word.
It is real; indeed,
More than all the rest.

Roiling waves of recoil
Rocked all established houses.
For even stolid business, seems,
Was but cultural,
As we've seen of science.
And ‘t 'was old culture's shell
That was a-doffing.

Those who'd seemed so grounded,
Through prior winds' diversions,
Were now confounded.
For these winds blew
From other planets.

The urge to new awareness,
With, conjoined, denial,
Concretized, yet still mysterious,
Made desperate clingers giddy.

Blown from this world,
Unsure of the next;
With and without faith;
Which way, and how, to turn?

Genesis

Slowly grew the will,
To regain their feet,
Though on new ground.
For the means to grasp the whole
Lay only in the whole.
And the way to one's own end of it,
So long in disuse.

So long so discarded,
So sadly misconstrued;
Leads to the Family,
The spiritual network,
Linking humanity,
The living being,
So out of order.

There were post Christian sects
That tried to mend the way,
And had some rare successes;
Finds came from that quarter.

Newburgh's own wife, Alma,
Developed CP,
Cyclo-reflective philosophy,
A base and bridge to

"Clairvoyance, " I call it,
For the melding -
Perception and conception,
With ourselves a part,
So the whole that was without
Is now simply with.

‘New, ' thinking made the core,
And the Family was born,
Into our awareness,
And the Family's own.
Genesis.
We are.

Now each day's filled with ringing,
As of a gong just struck,
But never fading, mysterious,
A ringing in our souls,
Now home within The Family.

The pulse and course between,
Run in every heart.
Almost enough to live on,
Though food is still required,
Now freely shared, forgotten,
But for places feting
Newburgh's eyes,
New Burger joints
Ah - with relish!
In every town,
Our only churches.

Churches with no other function,
No sharing grief, no supplication,
Just heartfelt thanks,
The state of all
Of The Family.

Career

Such looming Being.
But how it had been.
Our childish selves may be forgiven
For fearing change a death.

Not looking, daring,
Not remembering
Enormous mass of import,
The whole of meaning prior
Had been but a diversion.

A home and, too, a launch pad
Our ultimate connection
Our ultimate refuge
And yet but a floor

We've begun star travel
And see a vast career,
But none who set the course that day
Conceived such rich reward
As we find now at home,
In The Family.
Home.
Sweet Home.

Is our pleasure
Is our revolution
Is our happy day, to last?

Or is it bonus-ed by its freshness?
I think not.
Youth is sweet,
But life is deep and rich.

We will discover more,
More that here already
To be discovered,
Now that we are home
Everywhere.

Alien, alienation,
Abandoned abandonment,
Bereft of want,
We cannot fall back now,
Even when we sleep.

Even when we sleep,
We remember who we are,
And always will be -
Within The Family.

Have we, then, been born?
Or has The Family waked before?
There is no trace in history,
Though some find its precursors.

But those are metaphors
The Family lives the true life
Those were nothing like
Nor on the path
Of the recent realization
The recent Realization.

All those epics tell the want.
Their heroes' gifts,
Surcease of striving,
And new realized comforts,
Are yet tales of needy peace.

Of all, unique the moment
When our heaven is before us,
And we embrace
And are embraced
Of our Family.

Realization is all
That revelation can be
And more
For revelation falls
Mostly on deaf ears.

Now the Family shares it all.
All with all, one mighty Family,
Many times the poor billions
That we were before.
And awake, as we had slept.

Someday we won't recall,
Nor manage to recount,
Our lives without
The thrill of Being
Of our mother's body,
The one that we all are.

Is this heaven?
For heaven and hell
Are mortal states
projected from obscurity
By minds before the waking.

We shall live in bliss.
Just knowing it is bliss.
Now we see the way.

Now physics is a trifle,
We handle easily.
Indeed, now it's known,
Why we crave that knowledge.

The science diet,
The human centric system.
Only that relates;
human weal, the only gauge.

Now socialism is passé.
It's done en passant, en famille,
To make the former term chaotic,
As though conceived by barons,
Who brought us our first way
From jungle and cave warrens.

The Newburghers,
In those first years,
In philosophic idiom,
Spoke more politically
And were, you could say,
Countercultural.

The ardent pursued a Zionism
Not based on a promise,
But still a fate driven motive.
The Family was before us,
And these were marching on.

Vision

Von Newburgh,
Dressed in humdrum garb,
Stands before me.
Speaks:

"There is none more beauteous than me,
Not for how I look, but how I see.

"Say this to yourself,
Whenever it comes to you.
And, some day, you will see.

"If you could see with my eyes…"
And looking straight into me,
So that I saw my own self there,
"Ah.
"If you could see yourself with my eyes,
You would never be afraid."

I swore it was himself before me
He was old, yet stood erect
He spoke to me so clearly
That I was helpless moved
For he spoke just like a prophet.

He was old, yet young, essential,
All men superposed.
And as I sensed my waking,
With parting sorrow, asked him,
"Am I only dreaming? "

"No, " he says.
"Now you are awake."

And so I was.
I believe it to this day;
He did stand before me, then,
And spoke those words I heard.

Of course it was a dream,
But such a vivid one.
It must have been a dream;
No waking is so real.

In all my years since then,
It never came again.
But then, it didn't need to,
Since I hear it still,
The human timbre of his voice,
So ordinary, and so holy.

I see every morsel of the moment,
Each parting/joining of his lips;
Obscure mirth, love in his eyes,
Serene, and shared so freely.
‘T'was more than given, 't'was bestowed.
And never since, I've been afraid.
* * *
Newburgh's thought -
His realization -
Was so profound,
A shock, beyond men's reckoning
It seems the impulse of it
Reached back in time
To my receptive sleeping mind.

Indeed, the history tells
So many such tales, then.
A spike, then flowing swell
That built up through the day
of Newburgh's own arrival.

I am old now, he is young,
But he has had his realization.
And I'm sure an echo reached me then;
The impact so enormous,
It could not be contained
In just the single moment,
Nor all of those that followed.

It seems absurd, but charts assert.
And our modern,
our ‘New' thinking
Softens rigors of cause/effect,
For there are new dimensions to account.

The shock, the immensity,
Of what we'd overlooked,
As if lesser beings,
Though only for self-binding,
Burst childish vision like a bomb,
And shattered other obscure bonds.

A bomb sans death or illness,
But as much unsettling.
And our devotion to small things
Never did return.

Dreams

So now we see it,
The large thing in the room,
The air that embeds us,
And The Family within.

Childhood ended in a wonder.
Yet a greater wonder waited;
Our new age
Transcending childhood
Now we truly wake.

She asks, "Do you see heaven? "

"Yes.

"In every dream and waking."

For I remember Newburgh's vision,
Every moment,
In everything I pass.

And as I tell her,
I sense for myself,
Not in sequence,
But sideways, all at once,
The many dreams
I've had of heaven
So like our lives awake

Some outstripped the present
Like riding a green sward
‘Top sunny lawns, but a few inches,
No motor, smoke nor waste.
Clever magnets ‘neath the earth,
My flying carpet bore.

I know it's coming, we all do,
For our science is unsheathed;
In serving Man, given full power,
To bear our fairest dreams,
The ones we know are heaven,
Heaven on earth,
Our finally accepted fate.

I dreamed the present.
Of towers, round and shiny,
As there are today.
Where once there were but work stalls,
Now, too, the people lived,
Free of fear and hunger,
In these ordinary spaces.
And ordinary shops besides.
Odd, it seemed to me,
Yet harmonious as no other.

Houses, too, held our freed people.
Some deep and mysterious,
Curiously designed,
As restive architects of the past,
Could never have conceived.

Rooms within rooms,
Rooms down long halls,
All alive with people
Who knew their fates assured.

One there was, downtown,
An upper corner flat,
Beloved of its wed dwellers,
Who had it sectioned, sent,
By some great crane, heft,
And set down in a new place,
Home, to house them once again

And one, a lower,
Where the cat could go,
For the door was always open.
‘T'was my home there;
The cat is out,
And loved neighbors in.
On my arrival,
We all enjoy
A walk down to the stream,
Along and all about.

And yet others as delightful,
With ups and downs galore.
Private rooms and public,
And music they oft bore.

Each life a purpose,
And by a purpose moved,
Freely, prepaid, and secure.

No war will ever blight us -
The Family's preservation.
Peace and love
From now till none,
And mercy for the injured.

For there is no evil,
Nor ever was;
‘T 'was only weakness,
That could be cured.