Ray of Blue

The Preface to My Recently Published Volume of Poetry

The poems in Ray of Blue began to shape themselves from the radiance of fullness in the first weeks of the global shutdown in March 2020 brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. Their source didn’t change while humanity confronted, for the first time, its fragility and excesses as a global communal event. These poems arrived as messages from the supreme source of strength and balance.

These poems are transcripts of spiritual insights and revelations, which impressed themselves on me while meditating or when engaged in philosophical and theological reveries. Some of the poems are flush with symbolism and rhetorical flourishes while others are plain and didactic. Some arose as multihued jewels from the flaming treasury of the divine consciousness while others reveal truths unadorned with imagery whispered by the supreme teacher within. The verbal jewels appeared on my computer screen as they arose within me with little elaboration. In the didactic poems, I explore a meditative insight in order to amplify its wisdom.

To see these poems as revelation is to use a religious expression to suggest that poetry, in its most exalted performances, is a prophetic medium. Poetry is the seeing of the seers and the hearing of the hearers. Whether the poetry of revelation is labeled as poetry or scripture, it is a transmission from the innermost depths of Being. As such, poetry moves on lines of transmission that philosophy at its most intense sees only as a mystery arising on the other shore of its most skilled analyses. And to such heights, science cannot attain, unless it rides upon a chastened philosophy with a humble openness toward those sacred depths, which open their gates only to hearts and minds tutored in devotion and surrender to what ultimately is.

Although most of these poems are written in free verse, I have experimented with priming the pump of intuitive revelation by using metrical forms. In The Cloud Stairs, I wrote lines of eight syllables, as is usual in much of Sanskrit poetry (but without noting stress). I found that waiting for words to arrive under this limitation stilled the mind and chastened its fabulist movements. In the emptiness of silence, syllables soon appear as revelations of the primordial wisdom, which has guided us from before the dawn of consciousness.

Because I am a seer and a hearer before I am a poet, the content of the revelatory and visionary seeing that evokes these poems is primary. More important for me than the poetic virtues of these poems is their visionary content. Sometimes poetic skill and revealed imagery converge, while at other times the visionary element is stronger than the words. I let these poems stand because the revealed content overrides the weaknesses of form and style.

There is a mystical undercurrent in much poetry, which is a twofold way of using language, first to strip language of its familiar conventional forms, and second, to strip language of itself. This process of linguistic purification allows for verbal free sailing into whatever it is that ultimately is. This is exhilarating when it happens-as when reading Zhuangzi and the Upaniṣads.

These poems are vehicles for the mind to rise in flight to Spirit, to Brahman, to the Dao, to God, and to the Self. Attend to their imagery in reverent attention until the divine light awakens in you and restores you to unity with itself.

Ray of Blue and more of my writing in written and spoken form is available on Amazon.

Originally published at https://kenrose51.substack.com.