Only those with understanding
Can ever be convinced.
Tag: Poetry
Witness
A stunning realization.
All jurisprudence in the Bible was based on the testimony
Of two or three witnesses.
With this, we discover an end to ignorance.
Witnesses incur the understanding
That there is otherness;
Therefore, there is that which is beyond ourselves.
Thus, the predicament of our ego
Is found—and how we operate on this basis—
To be false. There is something more.
Yet without God, witnesses will bear false witness.
At the End of the Day
At the end of the day
There is not a shred of evidence.
Either aye or nay,
Either right or wrong.
For, when all are fools
And believe themselves wise
That other men had not spoken
That all ideas must be catchy and pithy quips…
What knowledge there is was hidden
By men in a state of egocentric predicament.
The Tyrants Let You Die
Padraic Pearse, oh poet,
The songs of a fool you did not sing.
Hung on your gallows,
The tyrants let you die.
But what for your song?
Were you hungry for violence?
For the love of Republican Government
You sung your heroes-songs
Of mother Erin.
And the Banshee keened,
Oh did the shade keen.
We, the land where your ye fellowmen fled
We stand berated by kings and princes
Who do now claim to have royal blood.
Are they Bourbon or Hapsburg
Perhaps they are, but America,
Mother Maria,
She to whom Erin’s Exodus fled,
We have no King.
What INFJs Cannot Understand
Men love nouns
More than verbs.
They love facts
More than ideas.
They like adjectives
Over adverbs.
They like active verbs
Over helper verbs.
They love simple answers
Over the right ones.
They like demonstrations
Over analogies.
They like deduction
Over axioms.
They like Science
Over English.
They like Speciation
More than wisdom.
They like straw men
For religion.
They like rumors
Over sources.
I will never understand why.
O Sweet Child
O sweet child
I came to tell you a truth.
Many will listen to the song
That sounds much like the winds and reveries of us all.
For men want to hear their hearts pipe to them from the other hearts.
But, to draw into the deep darkness,
To pour out truth is far more fruitful.
For, when acceptable in the eyes of the LORD
The strong winds of the crowd
To whom we chaunt,
Err like Echo, and it chaunts back;
Understand it is not our reflection to choose
In the poesy we pluck…
Rather, it is the heart of another
And their wisdom.
Whom, though, yours grew dark,
I ask you, “Was it I?”
And if that answer is yes,
I am sorry.
The carnal mind is full of sweetness,
But we try our furnace,
And let the embers flow over our souls
To melt its dross.
Skim it with the instrument.
Set it free.
For your prior truths were far more precious to me.
The Crown of Bacchus
Tyrant, o thou Fear!
Crippling art thou, Raging Pharaoh.
Thy decree is swift
Thy knife of angst stings all breasts
And stops all hearts from beating.
This phantom in the street
Hooded like the Shadow
Moves from door to door.
Is upon thy head
To steal from the little yeomen
Their ale and odes.
Where is the song in the taverns?
Where is the joy and mirth?
O, Pharaoh, with Bacchus’ crown,
You in your attire had silk and cashmere raiment
But stole the cotton-wool from the merrymakers.
Could you not spare them the miserable existence?
Or, must you continue to thresh us into the wind?
Academy
The professor pompously speaks his formulae;
Yet, he does not understand it.
He, rather, performs by rote his routine
A show, an ethos,—cries out foul on the students
Who do not trust him to give them the answers.
He fools millions, yet we understand it because a computer told us.
The mystery of this invention,
That what it says must be divine rite,
The professor uses it as an example
To teach, but he does not know what he teaches.
The Academy men sought out wisdom.
Our modern Academy, men remember what was wise
But becomes as vacuous as an empty vessel.
For, to have knowledge without understanding
Is a kind of sin we have passed down through our generations.
The Cedars of Lebanon
Covered in duct tape,
One sliver of tape across the top of its binding,
That’s split in the middle to the original black cover—
Revelation Chapter 22 falls out every time it’s opened.
It’s ten inches in height,
Five and a half in length,
Two and a half in depth.
There is an inch and a half tear
In the top corner of the binding
On the back cover.
The Duct tape frays at every edge.
Its pages curl on the corners.
It’s very flexible.
Weighs about eight ounces.
We Are Lost
We are lost
Lost to the fissure of war
Broken and turned.
Our leaders wish us starved
Or broken under combat.
They stir the Medes
Miles upon the great divides
Of sea and land and plateau.
Chariots thunder their wheels;
Great men and armies sail across oceans.
Why did the modest man get silenced?
Why did his breath get stolen from his pipe?
Why do we cower and be afraid
Of a phantom in the night?
As if death, if chosen,
Were not the better option.
Death haunts us,
His specter looms into every window.
Rather than make us fat, and nourished,
And allow the little Indians to eat,
The little Arabs and Medes and Persians
For our fat they must die.
Why do men follow the will of governments
Who send them overseas to do harm’s bidding?
Why do they march to wardrums
And hate what they will not understand?
Why, why, do we contemplate war
In an age which could prosper every man?
B. K. Neifert 