Body, Soul and Spirit

 
Body, Soul and Spirit

The body needs its food and drink, its sunlight and its air.
It also needs the healing calm, the long and restful sleep.
But what is it the soul requires, which gives to us our life,
That ties us each to other and to spirit, coursing deep?

The soul can draw its sustenance from beauty and despair,
From watching all that rises up and arcs and then descends...
The body and the soul are linked, and each without the other
Returns again to lifelessness, as all that's vital ends...

And where in this is spirit, whose tendril is the soul?
Can the leaf perceive the twig, the branch, and even know the tree?
We dwell within our ignorance, within our prisons small,
And yet, there is the universe – and spirit – boundless, free.

Let all illusions fall away, and yet let us survive
The dazzling light that spirit is, that also is the dark.
For thunder loud can point to it, and fill us then with awe,
And yet it is a whisper soft, to which the gentle hark.

There is a world of space and time, of messages between,
Of atoms in their whirling dance, of sound and light and fire.
There also is another world – they're woven tight, the twain –
And that's the world that lies within, of thought and of desire.

It's little use to use the tints of one to paint the other.
We dwell within the two-fold worlds, and each affects its twin.
Our bodies bridge these worlds – and though we can't describe the soul,
It's that which knows.  It's spirit-stuff, and only it can sin.

2015 May 3rd, Sun.
Brooklyn, New York