Where the spirits move me away from my fallen dream's reach
I can see where i am and what i've come past
But there's no reason why in sight
because they pushed me away from it so fast.
When the moods are bad and the days are long,
The people cross and my decisions wrong
There's a confusion around me with all i see
Is the only choice i have--to let the spirits move me?
There's an ocean that washes my dream from me
On endless tides of everyone else's history
It cleans my soul of muddied footprints in the rains
It ends my verses with traditional, bittersweet refrains.
Alone in the rain on a star-crossed beach
Where the spirits move me away from my fallen dream's reach
I can see where i am and what i've come past
But there's no reason why in sight
because they pushed me away from it so fast.
Above in the heavens each star stands alone
While below on the earth a trillion wishes have grown
Not from a star in a heaven, a light in the sky--
But from an outlook that settled in the corner of an eye.
Passed down like a painting that hangs on a wall
Of a captured summer landscape that escaped with the fall--
Beyond the reach of the strokes of the artist's brush
Like the winds in those paintings, now a colourful hush...
It seems to be that what i see is not real
It isolates some moment of a dream i should feel
A part of, around me, within me, and still--
Because i've moved on beyond what he saw
i'm not sure that i will.
It's a world all alone apart from my sight
It determines my pain
it restricts my delight
It hushes my questions and enforces what's right(?)
But no face emerges with the dawn's breaking light.
It's a quandary, a mystery, not the answer i seek
It makes my straight forward footsteps a journey oblique
It credits me nothing, it denies who i am
And says it is all part of its great master plan.
There is an animal that it says came down from the trees
It feels, it lives by more than it hears and it sees
Of all the animals it alone is the thinking one
A spirit made this animal to be His son
A spirit made this animal from grains of sand
The name God gave life to
is man.
After i've gone and the beach and the landscape are again free
To find their peace without me in the scheme of eternity
I wonder if the crashing waves on the shores
pause after the deaths of the sands...
Because the spirit that moved them and i
are moved by the same hands?
In my heart's eye,
I feel the wind.
I see the trees.
I soar across the heavens to the lonely stars on a breeze.
Beyond the spirits held lowly, their dreams now history
Is a place i see that the Spirit will move me.
--by GORDON C. WONG,
from "What Lies Beyond This
Door",*
copyright 1981 by GORDON C.
WONG
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