Fire and Water

The fire that burns in me today
Will also burn in me tomorrow
In all derangement and all sorrow
Its shadows shall the walls display.

Outside the opening of a cave
Or out of the volcanic crater
Is seen the truth of higher nature
And everything that it may save.

It is in everything that's true
And also everything apparent -
The sky, illumined and transparent,
Alit in pink and white and blue -

Reflects him as though through a prism
And into multi-colored splednor
The universal truth is rendered,
Like lava bursting through the schisms.

The fire that burns in me today -
A spark of all-consuming plasma -
Will percolate like a miasma
Into the place where shadows play -

Will burn the skin of all therein
And fill their noses full of poison
And make the place destroyed and noisome
Until in cave they can't remain;

But burst into the higher mind
From higher mind to higher senses
And as their spirit-form advances
They see the sun, but go not blind -

But burn through stone, through barren rock
And smash and tear and rise to passion
Shaking the earth like a concussion
And time resetting like a clock.

Water in heights; in water, heights -
In heights of mind exists life's essence
And in its gentle incandescence
At truth of universe arrives

In water, heights; and as its waves
Engulf, carress the restless kernel
Etheric merges with infernal
To cleanse the confines of the cave,

And send its members through the core -
Into the ever-waiting heaven -
And then return into the cavern,
This to repeat forevermore.

Ilya Shambat
https://sites.google.com/site/ibshambatpoetry