THE BIG QUESTIONS, 18: LESSONS ON THE LEAP OF FAITH. (WHY AND HOW CAN ONE BELIEVE? WHY BELIEVE IN LIFE, LOVE, LETTING GO?)

This is Poem #18* in my series of poem-responses to the Big Questions of Life and Living. Why must one believe? How can one believe? Why believe in Life, Love, and Letting Go? Why and when must one make his leap of faith, or not at all?

LESSONS ON THE LEAP OF FAITH

 

When the torch of desire burns clean
you would have learned all there is to learn:

To give, Datta. To feel and care, Dayadhvam.
To own and control, Damyata.Therefore,

To love beyond all loving because it is pure
like the mother suckles her infant. Give.

To know when caring will make things grow
like the raindrops nourish but will not sting.

To have and to hold even when that lashes
irreducible hurts to weary hearts that care.

It is for this that, naked, we halloo in the rain,
Let it come! Let all desires fill our dry vessels.

Then we wake to the warm caress of the Sun
for the day is always new, the flower lovely.

Is not the rose lovelier when its thorns sharpen?
Does not the potter’s knife need its razor edge

to pare the lips of the wine jar and smoothen
its mouth that lovers may drink to full desire?

Bare your body then to its wild abandon, salve
it with the cool spring water now welled

from the earth, and open your mouth to kiss
the sunlight, defy the anguish. Never say, not yet.

Let it come! Let the leaves fall on this Upanishad,
because the leap of faith is never to say Not yet.

 

—ALBERT B. CASUGA

* To help celebrate National Poetry Month (NaPoMo April 2013), I thought I would write and cull poems from my archive which focus on my take of the answers I might give to those posed by Prof. Simon Blackburn in his The Big Questions, Philosophy, 2009, Quercus Publishing, Plc,, London, UK. Mr. Blackburn is a philosophy professor at Cambridge University in England.