Gathered on This Beach: Poems & Perspectives for a Converging World

the wheel that burns

Into the wheel that burns...

Into the wheel that's blind and burns;

The wheel that yearns and overturns

We're born...

We are its forms,

Bound with a spirit ever deep and able

Blown in its throws into brightness,

Blown where it goes into darkness,

Thrown into thorns and turned towards scorn;

Made to mourn and conform to the dawn;

Haunted by the feel and by the feelings of forms -

Our fellow forms -

It uses for the forming of fresh forms

To fill the warm and harsher hollows of its storm...

A storm that stirs and stirs to grow;

It wants; it needs to feed to grow -

Amid the features of our woe -

Through all our scratching in the snow,

Our powers that we need to know -

To sow and fight with pride against consuming fires

Of everything we'll never know -

And never trust to know

So we can grow...

So we must always know -

Where we must yearn,

Where the wheel would burn -

To not be overthrown...

Where we are we; where we're alone

Where we are one; and what we have become

And may be what we may become -

We will be overcome, and overturned...

Oh we must be stern

To laugh and love and live through all the yearnings

Of the turnings

Of the blind, misguiding wheel that burns...