1 – SONNET ON VISION

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        What inward sight illuminates our way –
 
        Whose lucid eye can all the ages span –
 
        To see the Mystic Law that holds its sway
 
        Beyond the endless birth and death of Man?
 
        The luminary moon, when night is done,
 
        Still rules the tides, though the daylight hides it.
 
        The lotus always turns to face the sun
 
        And yet what blossom eye ever guides it?
 
        The cross-eyed men with intellect adorn
 
        Their intuitions – blind who lead the blind –
 
        The common mortals – blind when they were born –
 
        With doubtful eyes that Truth could never find.
 
         We look – we stare – we gaze and gaze – but we,
 
         With sightless eyes, forever fail to see.

~ Harley White

2 – SONNET ON TIME

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        Is time a spiral stairway that we climb
 
        Whose unendingness we seek to borrow
 
        To the last wrought syllable of our rhyme
 
        Tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow –
 
        The fusion of the future with the past
 
        In dizzying dimensions ever new
 
        Which hurl us headlong in a void so vast
 
        That what we view as false appears as true?
 
        We must peer through bars forever blocking
 
        Upon the threshold of our promised land –
 
        At the gates of eternity knocking –
 
        Outside we stand – albeit hand in hand.
 
         Through the rush of time we’re ceaselessly swirled.
 
         How heartless is the transience of this world!

~ Harley White

3 – SONNET ON MIND

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        When reflecting on the nature of mind
 
        Of what wit or wisdom do we dare speak?
 
        For the wind in the sky is all we find,
 
        In a round and round game of hide and seek.
 
        It’s mind over matter, sages surmise;
 
        With power of mind as their driving force
 
        Deductive logicians philosophize
 
        From ‘We think, therefore we are...’ as the source.
 
        We muse; we spin, in dreaming delusion,
 
        Our webs of thought, until nought we behold,
 
        And heady with sense, fall in confusion.
 
        Or is yet the end of the story told?
 
         As our labyrinth journey turns and twists,
 
         We lose our way in miasmas and mists.

~ Harley White

The Hoodoos near Fairmont Hot Springs, British Columbia
Credit: Gerhard Lenz