CREDO
Nativity clamps the carnal on the soul;
Henceforth is spirit bond-slave to the world,
A consummation ill appraised by Man,
Who copulates with Nature to produce
A progeny of deeds promoting self,
Repulsive brats on which the smiling minx
Beams with material pride, their form
Implicit in the genus of the dam,
Each one a grandchild of the Omnipotent,
Creator and Disposer of the universe
(So aces the teaching of the hierarchy),
Hence author of the falsities, fatuities
And felonies of Man, Time’s catalogue
Of infamies derived
From Man’s incestuous dallying with the source,
Malignant source of that pins the wings
Of spirit on Its upward journey home
To come unsullied to that scared fount
From whence it rose: to overcome the world
In hope by some rare-trodden stony path
To vindicate the aims of Man to God,
Creator of the soul but not the flesh,
Compassionate Light of Nature’s cruel realm,
Though not its lord, absolved from authorship
By virtue of the Ceaseless enmity
Twixt Nature and the soul.
Injustice were enough to mark her world
As work of clumsier hand, its laws
In diametric contradiction of
The ways of all that Man has ever glimpsed
Of worth and greatness;
Where man may fell a blameless child or rape
Whate’er his lustful eye has seen and craves
Without, compunction, pity or remorse;
No whit distinct from beasts, except the soul
Lay hindering hard upon the vicious act.
“The weakest to the wall”, is Nature’s law,
"Adapt and live: conform or die,” her will.
But some this servitude repudiate,
Detested strangers from another race,
Who face the retribution ineluctable
The price of daring to defy the world
And scorning Nature and her toadie, Man;
As birds who burst the bars and face the wild.
Are mobbed and done to death by Nature’s louts
Who sense the exotic nature of their prey
And sense the plumage of another breed.
So they who glimpse the eternal understand
In mystic ways the bloody road to heaven;
Justice, a piteous stranger in her world,
Awaits adoption but it waits in vain
And ever will; imperious stands the queen,
Intransigent, implacable, malign,
Mistress of the gamble and of Chance,
Creatrix foul of Inequality,
Spirit of the earthquake and the storm;
Pitiless, adamantine, unrestrained;
Temptress to murder and rapine
And every bloody deed the world may delve
From out the dark subconscious of the race.
For even bishops preach the need to kill
And many a Calvary has soiled the page
In the recorded annals of mankind.
She, lest Man should evade her servitude,
Devised the joys of Sex to bait the trap
That Man might multiply and flood the earth
With countless victims of her vicious laws
That pens the emanation called the soul,
The essence made is image of a God.
No power, creator of the soul, could e’er
Have sired a world so pitiless and wild
Where Man must either kill or choose to die,
Where all are prey to fellows. Nature’s joys
Are few, designed to serve her ends alone
To stir the brutish instincts, tempting Man
To do her will and blindly to observe
The canons of the flesh.
The lie, from youth inherited and enshrined
In crusted creeds devised by priests of old
When Man still strove to understand his fate,
Attributing cosmogony to God,
Has been a bane to alienate the mind;
And many a gentle soul has turned awry
To scorn a God who such a world devised
For all that priestly lore may certify.
Anomalies so patent ne’er could gain
The heart’s devotion or the mind’s assent.
for pity is the chiefest attribute
Of one who seeks to win frail Man with love.
“Does God demand allegiance, while His world
Thus batters at the portals of the soul?"
Man seeks to know.
Law, morals, justice, long unknown to Man,
He learned to know by sheer necessity.
The strong right arm alone was arbiter
And many starved to feed the strength of one:
The emergent soul in all its might arose;
So was discovered Justice.
Eons ere embryo Man’s ascent
In course of time from out the primal ooze
It ever was; so will ever be,
Immutable, ineffable, sublime.
So untold eras came and went for Man:
With untaught eyes he scanned the universe
And all its dreaded powers; to each assigned
A god, in suppliant terror sacrificed
To each; slaughtered defenceless beasts whose blood
Atoned for his shortcomings; oft would slay
His human kind in hope to expatriate
The demons of the fate that dogged his steps.
Thus awe imposed the need
To venerate the mysteries and extend
Obeisance to a power that could devise
So wondrous a contrivance; thus a god,
Creator of such wonders, was evolved,
A god of battles, jealous, vengeful, made
In likeness of his great creator, Man:
So Jahveh came to be together with
A myriad other gods of Man’s design
Utilitarian. A sapient race
Learned more of godhead; mighty prophets rose
By other-worldliness inspired, led Man to see
The nature of the God he strove to know,
Epitome of spirit and its source,
Each soul as an emanation from His being,
The fount of Pity, Justice, Truth and Love
Quintessence of the eternal verities
Speaking the silent language of the soul.
His own knew well the accents of his voice
Which soothed the blistering thirst that ailed the flesh,
Revealed the transcendent nature of the soul,
That Man might share liaison with the eternal,
Have cause for hope and justify a faith
In immortality.
Anthropomorphic error, firm entrenched,
Persistent credos that insult the mind
Besieged the ear and led the heart astray.
The child, now come to manhood, looks with scorn
On childhood terrors that constrained to load
The altars with the flesh of men and beasts;
With laws expounded and enigmas solved,
The world of matter charted, metered, marked,
In measure great subdued. And some there are
Who, scanning Nature’s realm, have testified:
"Here is no God. What need of mystic lore
And supernatural fetish inexplicable,
Since Man has exorcised the ghosts of yore
That terrified and bred the need of gods?
Man now is God and master of his fate.
What is subsists within the universe
And all in time by Man will be subdued."
No God to be the author of the ills
That yet beset the path of suffering Man!
Exoneration, long delayed, is come.
What power placate, then, but the dame herself?
Inherent in her essence must be found
The genesis of all that marks her realm.
Alas, that Science finds no need of God
And cannot take the measure of the soul,
Nor woo its handmaids, Truth and Beauty fair!
Exotic species not within its scope;
Can sound the depths and chart the earthquake’s roar,
Construe the winds and mete the lightning flash,
Can map the firmament and tell light years
Of stellar radiance;
Can disencumber shoulders bowed with toil
And therapeutic wonders consummate,
Yet not record the still small voice that speaks
The mystic ways of knowing.
No heaven is born of what ignores the soul,
No conquest of the forces of the world
Will satisfy the hunger of the heart:
When all is done, remains the challenge still,
The yearning after greater worlds to win,
The Infinite ever calling to the soul
In tones imperative. But Science now
Absolves God from the age-old monstrous lie
That charged Him with the birth of Nature’s whims,
While greater minds point out that mystic road
The senses cannot tread.
August l970