My Light is a circle, complete in itself,
It joins without ending, it ends without delf,
And inside the circle, on which the light shines,
‘Round living and dying, the world intertwines.
Its ripples and ruffles rejoin and divide,
In numberless pieces, its masses collide.
It takes many faces, it grows many eyes,
Its voices in chorus extend to the skies.
Though reaching for beauty, these voices are lost,
Their hearts are divided, their purposes crossed.
Each carries the keys to the others’ true song,
The keys to return them to where they belong,
But gath’ring these sounds is a puzzle most great,
Each part to be rallied, and not to conflate,
A possible answer remains out of sight,
Wherever the parts stand, they’re blocking the light.
Until this assembly, if ever it comes,
Our evil and goodness will hammer war drums,
What burgeoning strands could re-ravel the two,
Have tendrils too fragile, still number too few.
As provenance fades, swallowed up by the past,
We slip from the first before finding the last.
So growing remains a confused causal chain
A great song of struggle, of pleasure and pain.
My light, through this turmoil, sits ever sublime
In halcyon, present, perennial time.
It lies underneath and it floats up above,
It radiates purely awareness and love.
Thus stands the division, of heaven from earth,
Eternity’s sunrise from death giving birth.
True wisdom consists in discov’ring this ground,
By no longer looking, I find that I’m found.
And yet, this clear picture cannot be complete,
For light and illumined in duet accrete.
The world in its bab’ling, cacophonous swirl,
Still somehow engenders its dawn to unfurl.
Though bound by the circle, and issuing thence,
It also creates its own first-person sense,
And, over its reaches, beyond wrong or right,
Enkindling its ending, it rejoins my Light.
Several years ago I read a collection of funny answers given in maths exams. I cannot remember the name of this collection, and cannot find it today, but one answer that always stuck with me was the following definition of a circle, “a circle is a line that joins its own end without ending”. At first, its memorability stemmed from how funny I found it, but later it came to mind in the context of spiritual development, and suddenly seemed disarmingly profound. A pattern that plays out on many levels of inquiry is that what you thought was the end is in fact the beginning, and that the impetus that started the whole journey is also what you created by finishing ig. The essential Buddhist project is to escape the suffering caused by the capricious and unreliable world of Samsara, but eventually this project leads back into the very thing it set out from. Another example occurs in two of the great mysteries of life: where we did we come from and where are we going? Without knowing the answer to these, some part of me realizes that they are both the same question in a different form.
A delf is an area that has been excavated or dug out, and represents something defined, manipulated, pentrated; the opposite of something pure and untouched.
As a physical manifestation of the circular way of this poem, it exists in printed form on a Möbuis strip, where the first two words double as the last two. There are a (very) limited number available from TypeWronger books in Edinburgh.