A Brave New Worldview

By Hank Edson

What songs can raise humanity out of the industrial materialism of our capitalist society into the spiritual and scientific enlightenment of an ecological, egalitarian worldview? What songs can ring our core with the fragile and heroic condition of the human being in a time of increasing global imbalance? This volume's 57 poems both sing and advance our spiritual and scientific sophistication in a way that calls to account both our hearts and minds to a more precise awareness of our human purpose, equality, vulnerability, and potential. Exploring love, politics and our connection to nature and to each other at many levels, each poem brings to life the beautiful synthesis of wisdom and mystery that are life's universal. This volume ends with "Tears for Amy," an elegy for a former classmate, Amy Biehl, a Fulbright scholar killed at the age of 26 while studying the transition to democracy in South Africa. A meditation on democracy, society, humanity, and the future for which Amy was working, "Tears for Amy" is 676 lines long, written in 26 26-line stanzas of terza rima, to mourn the young age at which Amy lost her life. The mission evoked in this volume's epigraph is that poetry is needed to advance, with music, image, eloquence and imagination, the brave new worldview for which our modern times are urgently calling. In fulfilling that mission, the poems in this volume will unite your heart's tenderest longing with the revolutions turning in the wider world. This is poetry that will engage us the way we need to engage with our time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9780359869213

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Edson

Copyright Page

Democracy Press

Copyright © 2009, 2019 by Hank Edson

All rights reserved.  No part of this book may be transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-359-86898-8

Democracy Press

2106 Oberlin Street

Palo Alto, CA  94306

Http://www.democracypress.net

Cover design by Hank Edson. 

Artwork on cover is a copy by Hank Edson

of Georges Lacombe’s Marine bleue, Effet de vagues, 1893

Dedication

To Ingrid,

My love and happiness

And with gratitude to

Shah Nazar Seyyed Dr. Ali Kianfar

and Dr. Nahid Angha:

The following pages owe the best they contain

to your teachings and wisdom.

Epigraph

"…art possesses immense potential

to advance a worldview

that could help assuage

the societal terrors posed by globalization,

the most thoroughgoing socioeconomic upheaval

since the Industrial Revolution,

which has set off a pandemic

of retrogressive nationalism,

regional separatism,

and religious extremism."

~ Martin Filler

A Brave New Worldview

1.  Mind

The world is really not so small

As you hear the people say.

What do we know of this little ball,

This seed that is made of clay?

Only by grace of the shining fall

Of the sun’s enlightenment

Do we claim right to knowledge at all,

But where does the darkness end?

For without the sun, this dizzy berth,

Sunk in the chaos of dreams,

Would lie asleep, our minds and the earth

And space without sense or seams.

Without the sun we would go grasping

After stars as for a hand,

Our mind’s dense maze blindly passing

Not trying to understand.

But blessed by the love of sacred sun,

We awake and grow and thrive,

And when the time for night’s rest has come,

We know that we are alive.

Blessed are we in warmth of orbit

And seasons teaching wisdom.

Alone by the shore, we come to sit

And muse at nature’s kingdom:

The curve of the earth, the starry sky,

The sweeping stillness over;

The crash and twinkle of you and I,

Lovers loving each other.

Our arms are like the double helix

Shaping our humanity;

Chaos and love, the spiral matrix

Measuring infinity.

Tonight by your side the vertigo

Of galaxies stretching out

Their arms and emitting a soft glow,

Of whispers, echoes, and shouts,

Of endless light-years and the perfect

Celestial clarity,

The peace and universal elect,

The natural charity

Of being alive and so naïve

To the entire existence,

Yet eager and enthralled, I believe

As consciousness awakens.

The beauty and wonder breaking bonds,

The life of thought breaking through,

The physical material donned,

Urged to the light, to the true.

Within the soul struggles to open

The dawn, to move from itself

Like sunlight.  Strangely then, here awoken

By the stars and darkened shelf:

The vast night plane!  I think of Einstein

And his relativity,

His famous equation, space and time:

So much mass and energy!

The world is really not so small

As we people often think

For the smallest atoms of us all

Have sky-wide souls at the brink.

2. Heart

How long have I looked out at the night,

Feeling its emptiness pull?

How long have I gazed without insight,

Heaven unfathomable?

The size of the earth and our devotion

To it, what will they may,

Vast is life, this surfaceless ocean

Through which we dream and pray.

Vast is the gaseous solution

In which we are minuscule

And filled with enormous confusion

We have blindly set to school.

For space is not just the airlessness,

It’s the disorientation,

It’s the chaos, panic, and distress

Of our alienation.

Alone to be the only living

In all of the universe!

What a mysterious beginning,

Like a seed, the very first!

And yet, from whence came we, from what source

This Milky Way Galaxy?

And how with all this beautiful force

Is nature to be empty?

And why with life are we given death?

As though our fragile o-zone

Would surrender to space our last breath;

Red hot earth, cold dark grown.

All the teachings of humanity

Swirl in nebulous abstract

While greed and fear and insanity

Destroy the longed for contact.

Just to glimpse eternal combustion

We with extravagant hopes

Are lost in ecstatic construction

Of orbiting telescopes,

We poets who in the spheres do sing

Of the need of wide abyss

In which to surrender everything ~

So brief and intense is bliss~

Find the joys of life miraculous

Need infinite depths to fill,

But afterwards what happens to us

May depend upon our will.

Never before have I had this thought

Until tonight being with you,

Never through all the hard lessons taught,

Did I believe could be true

The fact so simple that life is love

And that to love is to live,

That deep inside us, not far above

Is the source that will forgive.

To the open heart of pure belief

All is one united whole.

From within it we must grow the reef

Beyond ourselves of our soul!

Never have I looked out at the night

Feeling through my body pull

Past inert darkness, the shining light,

Love and life forever full!

3.  Heart and Mind

Is it really such a giant leap

To unite the heart and mind?

To imagine love and logic keep

Common cause in what they find?

A man upon the moon once raised

With one small step all mankind.

The simple effort Armstrong praised

Gave vision to the blind;

To see the Earth