ABOUT PASSAGE, DIVINE AND DEVOTIONAL LOVE POEMS

Some poets write about life experiences in the form of spiritual abstraction. I’ve come to write about spiritual abstractions in the form of life experiences. These experiences may take the form of “Reality” (Truth).

At other times they take on the face of Suffering, a deep-seated memory of an eternal “Home” and also of Love. The latter (Love) especially appeals to me, because it is the very thing that drives us away from our true innermost self while leading us always to its realization.

When Love and Self reveal in unison, the experience is that of Divine Love and the love poems become “Devotional Poems.” What that has done to me as a poet is to speak of the lover as that miraculous link between the human and the divine. At other times, I speak purely of the Divine and myself as the lover. In either instance, the lover is everyone and everywhere yet is not just anybody and anything.

Love is not always object, but the object of Love is always an experience of Love in the Divine sense. If the love for the Divine is embraced, the experience of falling in love becomes an experience that constantly recreates from within. When this happens, one face becomes “a thousand faces” —and that is the face of the Divine.

Not being able to find the words to describe the right category for these poems, I have decided to put them simply under “Passage” because in order to exit and enter into experiences in life, we cannot choose which ends or how and when. We simply go through a passage.

Some of these poems date back as far as 1993 (when I was 23 years old). They contain the seeds of all the realizations to come.

(alphabetical order)