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Liquid Fire and Brittle Light
by jas Tuesday, Sep 13 2016, 12:06pm
international / poetry / post

heat
nuclear heat,
how it scorches the ignorant
yet to the wise the sun is neither hot nor cold

life flows away like water tracing a path
thru roaring falls, tiny trickles
to a drop of rain that falls from the sky,
but it’s all water
regardless of appearance

a garden cannot grow without water and light
which emanate from the same eternal source --
a man cannot live and evolve
without the fire that burns
away ignorance
or tortures his soul
until he wakes to light

i have lived in a garden of delights and horrors,
strange plants that grow nurtured by actions and inaction,
each tree and bush producing a flower and fruit after its own kind,
bitter or sweet whatever the case may be

eventually the overwhelming variety becomes tiresome, meaningless
as everything is reduced to dust
yet from dead ashes life
emerges anew transformed by experience --
flying at times higher than the sun only to return
to the tallest tree in the garden
the germination and nurturing of which
i have long forgotten

atop this tree a strange fruit ripens
its flesh, food for the body,
its juice quenches a thirsty soul

but it’s the seed that confounds the mind;
prismatic, geometric, spiraling to the ground below
only to germinate as a different species that produces
a fruit of a different kind