Ode to Consciousness

There is a meeting place of mind and eyes
where images compete for conscious view
and where perception banishes surprise
at what is beaten down, and what wins through.
With or without our influence or ken
it's here our individual selves begin;
for some are dulled and others walk in sleep
never to wake again,
though quiet voices whisper in the din
of time for laughter and a time to weep.

That part of us that is no rushing thing
awaits our quietness, or our fatigue
if nothing less can calm the eddying
onrush of our futilities. Intrigue,
infatuation, habit and despair
crowd to the fore, impatient - yet it waits
forever and beyond. Is it so weak
that it cannot declare
an interest in our battle with the fates,
or does it hide because we fail to seek?

What flows below the words may yet awake
remembrance of an earlier array
of promises fulfilled. Each new mistake
derails the latent urge, with each new day,
to change before the changeless. We can hear
the choral syntheses of soil and soul
proclaim the unity of earth and mind
in answer to the fear
of gradual dissolution of the whole
of consciousness, as molecules unbind.