Flowers of the Sun

By Joseph Kent

That Joseph Kent is able to integrate earth and spirit into his work is remarkable in that, unlike mystics of old, he lives and works in an urban nightmare of mental and physical pollution, competing, as most of us have to do, in rat races of dog eat dog, where stress, illness and crime abound: ‘And in my SoHo dwelling on Thompson Street o

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stratton Press
• Release date: Jul 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9781643451213

Joseph Kent

Joseph Kent was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and is a graduate of the California Institute of Integral Studies, with a graduate degree from Antioch University. He lives in San Francisco, and has been published in magazines, quarterlies, journals, and anthologies, including Collaboration, Mother India, In The Company of Poets, California State Poetry Quarterly, The Irreversible Man, and New Poets Anthology. Flowers of The Sun is Joseph Kent's third published book.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editors of the following magazines, in which some of these poems first appeared: Collaboration: A Quarry Lagoon, Appearances, (later published in Mother India); Seer, Samadhi, and Starry Night. Mother India: The Season of Light, (first appeared in The Plowman Anthology: Seascape, and In The Company of Poets’); Gleam, Nisus, Vedapuri (also printed in Collaboration) and Day Of Siddhi.

Several poems have also appeared in a limited edition, White Wind, 1989, and in Streams, Sunlight Publishers, San Francisco, 1996.

It is the fixed anchoring of the intelligence in a state of desireless equality that is the one thing needed.

Sri Aurobindo

Appearances

The mystery of the puzzle surrounded us

in our darkness

Could we ever discover the magic, transmute

the gloss of our elusive world

into earthly delight in the eternal

dance of a mysterious universe?

True, a drear existence seemed the lot

of many on the earth

though ancient vedic seers had affirmed the world

in original luminous vision

We struggled, dreamed

in the stark reality

The human strife

The misery of the streets

And there was delight!

For they dwelled side by side in the teeming

cities of our world

In the pilgrimage of the journey

we plodded on in penurious wounds

questing toward Fire and the lift

to a better state

And on oracular paths

the conundrum was unriddled, the mystery

illuminated in the flame

Life blossomed, transfigured,

redeemed in light

We saw this world

just as the ancient seers

as the beatitude

of Brahman, eternal

radiance of the Divine

The Season of Light

A Christmas mist settles over the city

at dawn. It is the season of light.

The matrix race roves the earth

in travail with birth

of a new being.

Out there beyond

the barbarous comedy

of mind, glimmerings of the sacred

advance of Spirit involved

in flesh, the gene evolving

in light, bring Magi,

the children…

Starry Night

The secret of happiness lies in a creative fusion of the unique and the cosmic.

—Haridas Chaudhuri

Starry night in June

I climb to the silence

of my roof overlooking the bay.

Above, the stars…

Galaxies adrift. A sublime

arching over and