The Race

 

 

Sun light, a starter’s gun, the crack

of dawn and she is off!

Coiled energies of thought –

idea, need, hope, expectation, fear,

in ever-tightening writhing rounds

compressed to fit maniacally

within the scope of mind impotent

to birth form, to realize,

to give thought actuality –

now waked, spring forth

to furious action called;

unleashed potential hungry for release, zealous

to capture territory jeopardized by sleep.

 

The race is on against her self

and all that threatens to impede

the undammed torrent of

pragmatic purposes, numbered designs.

With little enough love to give

to less substantial things than these –

pictures she’s hoarded through the night

against the morning’s emptiness –

she pours herself with restive zeal

into the unsuspecting day.

The breach innocent of intent 

falls vanquished, helpless to compete.

Humanity – the veiled needs

that can or will not press themselves

upon her craning consciousness –

falls victim to her tyranny

and dies a little more each day.

 

The litany of demands, of goals –

insistent, unrelenting chant –

into ungraceful and uncharted time

pushes and prods and lures.

Hurtled in heady seeming-flight

against the boundaries of being

she breaks the hold of place and soars,

imagination’s wings imperiled.

Ah, Icarus!  You flee too far

from level plains, from personhood,

and surely someone will be hurt

as in the ensuing battle mind

contends with fleshed reality.

 

At times her body must cry out

in pain to have its voice heard.

Oblivious to more subtle signs,

unwillingly she stops, frustrate,

begrudging the demands of weak

and uncooperative flesh.

She chafes against constraining bounds –

the slow banality of form –

preferring imitation sleep

where idea idolized confronts

no other, no impediment.

 

 

 

At bedtime having thus all day

so dis-remembered self,

neglected essences for accidents,

sped past all pain heedless and numb,

she sleeps again, but fitfully –

mind circling round to catch at the elusive,

subtle-coded, hint

that something she’s forgotten lies

beneath the shifting surface of

her sketchy memory of the day.

 

As usual, the nagging sound

of this small voice rapidly drowns

in the upsurging, but convenient, tide

of vain imaginings.

Dancing before her inner eye

are plans and virtues shining, bright –

all but accomplished, shy of flesh.

Perfected thus, demanding not,

they lull her back to dreamless sleep.

Morning’s cramped coil begins to form anew

as images seduce her unavailing mind

into a sleep that mimics true repose.

 

If only she could truly rest,

unwind the convoluted brain,

and still the clockwork movements of

the tortuous inner machine,

then One who knows her better than

she ever knew herself could win

the race on her behalf and win

her to Himself, a soul enfleshed.

 

Quickened to life within His gaze

attendant only to the voice that calms all storms

she’d wake, refreshed, becalmed,

beloved, finally free,

emptied, a mere capacity,

bereft of the false sovereignty

that, unruled and usurping,

has smothered and quenched the fire of love

with violent, uncreative flames.

Ravished by, and relinquished to

the sabbath rest of sabbath’s Lord,

plunged to her depths in sabbath peace,

by His torrential grace restored,

united, husbanded, made whole,

slowed to a singleness of soul,

unmirrored now, true face to Face,

undriven, still, and so the race

is won.

 

 Charlotte Ostermann,

 September, 2006