Origins

You don’t throw away the book you came out of

You don’t lightly discard

Your particular upbringing

When you think you’ve gone further

You couldn’t anyway

Being as it’s all in you and through you

Coming out through its cracks in you

Because you’re a part of it

Yet, you can let go, and leave any outer freely

When the kernel of its innards is truly, truly in you

Though telltale traces of its colour will always remain

To sprout out through your thoughts and inspired creations

Old things in new things they were always emerging

But refined through the leaving becoming most precious

And coming to the end of it, released unto liberty

All glorious, all new . . . at last!

Though many secretly despised the holy screed

More treasured it

It contained the source, the origin and the wellspring

Of all that was good and noble in this world

The light to clear away the clutter

But, misread, it caused the greatest of horrors in it

Falsely turned one-sided it did more harm than good

Mostly in those who thought they knew what it meant

Its living language could shrivel up little weeds

But inflate bigger ones

Reading by its outsides seeing only shadows

Afraid of embracing what took from them

Not owning the freeing humiliation:

Of not understanding what made

The beginning of knowledge and the uncoverer of treasure

Expecting to understand raised blinkers

And blinded

Deeply hidden the truth from my proud prying eye

It was in seeing myself in the bad weeds in the story

That set me free for the best joys

And deep comprehending

All else led to lead weights and a hard judging heart:

Oh what I lost of the truth through the gaining

Of what I thought to be the knowledge of it