A New Beginning

Are you ready?
Yes
Are you really READY?

Forty days of deep meditation
Forty nights of dream saturation
Forty days and nights of fasting
Towards this day and life everlasting

Yes
I am ready

A torch-lit path to an oaken door
That opens like a black, black maw
Darkness, complete, bar a dull glow
Of coals awaiting incense’s throw

Narcotic herbs to open the gates
Aromatic spice to hasten the way
Exciting resins to strengthen resolve
Each inform the thick grey tendrilling smoke

Reality shifts…

The sun shines black, a statue sings
A prose piece speaking of mythical things
Sightless people amble around
An idol floating above the ground
A God to none, worshipped by all,
Who dance the dance at the Lunatics’ Ball.

Reality shifts…

… and flows away
As I drift back to an earlier time
And meet the elders of my line
Who bear my blood, bear my name
The earliest ancestors of my race
Who look like me, have my face
And tell of the place from whence I came

And still further back I flow
To a time before time that no one knows
When life is an impulse, a possibility
And the future an infinite branching tree.
I sense the spirits of wolf and bear
Of owl, deer and leaping hare
They, and more, approach and part
‘Til the hawk stays with me: we share a heart

And further, further back we fly
To a time before time with a black, forbidding sky
That enfolds us within a featureless sphere
The spirits are gone there’s nothing here
Except my totem hawk and me
And…a scintilla of light at infinity
That grows and moves and stikes my head
Then no more, I am as if dead.

A millions years later,
An hour down the line

I entered that place an ordinary man
But I am not he, that was before
After death and rebirth, I face you now
As shaman, mage and sorcerer