The following piece of a poem by Nobel Prize poet Seamus Heaney is from a six-part work he titled "Ministry of Fear." The last two line are what stay with me for they speak of the chance each of us is given with our lives – to live with "meagre heat" or to live"The comet's pulsing rose."
Heaney's lines brought to my mind a photo of Dane Dakotas, taken around 1980. It portrays the timeless beauty of a female nude, wave-curled amid rocks somewhat the way a diamond is gripped by its setting. The woman seems so much like the pulsing rose of a comet. Yet, she also seems trapped the way so many of our hearts are trapped within spirits frightened to express themselves. We spend so much time "blowing up sparks for their meagre heat," struggling toward our idea of survival and reaching for safety. Sometimes I find myself thinking that it is our struggle for safety that keeps "the comet's pulsing rose" from blooming forth within us and without.
How can we free the diamond within us to spin and sparkle and rise like a wave to meet the passing comet – and ride it to the oblivion to which we are already doomed?
Here is the fragment from Heaney:
…Rain comes down through the alders,
Its low conducive voices
Mutter about let-downs and erosions
And yet each drop recalls
The diamond absolutes.
I am neither internee nor informer;
An inner emigre, grown long-haired
And thorughtful; a wood-kerne
Escaped from the massacre,
taking protective colouring
From bole and bark, feeling
Every wind that blows;
Who, blowing up these sparks
For their meagre heat, have missed
The once-in-a-lifetime portent,
The comet's pulsing rose
-Erie Chapman
Journal of Sacred Work 
Leave a reply to ~liz Wessel Cancel reply