Poetry

Judgement 33

“Subjectively, seen from my own perspective

(The only way to see matters like this)

The whole world ends with me. Because I live

The world exists. I cannot die because

Nothing can be if I do not survive

Such is the sovereignty pledged by Jesus.

Men are not real, they’re not as real as me.

Nothing is real. People, quite naturally,

“Do not exist in just the way I do.

People are separated from the real.

This world is mine alone, I know it now.

I was dead. I was scattered. It was hell.

I was unconscious, nothing, that is true.

I look back and I know it very well:

I have been dead and in my recollection

God gave me mind and his divine perception

“It is his consciousness that I possess

And his world-starting foundations I am.

I am not God. I take things. Nonetheless

He made me the foundation just like him.

It is the truth, he showed it on the cross

When he eschewed his death when his time came.

And in the life he gave sufficient proof

That the abject man is at the root of life.

“I alone demonstrably have a fate

As God is also completely alone.

How can I do wrong or chose to do bad

When no one else exists? Should I condemn?

Why should I steal or take another’s bread

When I alone am? Kindness, attention

In my book is the order of the day.

I should not tolerate an other way.

“There is no cause to lie to a sad world.

In my world I should only tell the truth.

To lie to dead ones, unreal people, would

Additionally, to their want of breath,

Put on their shoulders yet more dark falsehood,

Or set at nothing things of little worth.

And so, it is becoming to do good

To do the decent thing and not the bad.

“Toward the dead and unreal there is no reason

To be manipulative or dishonest.

I am alone alive, and from each person

A world centre whose meaning seems to have vanished

I look away; but in my meditation

See Jesus on the cross when it was finished -

Dead like the others but resurrected:

He, lonely, and all God, rose from the dead.

“As one alone lives, in a similar manner

I am the centre of the world in time,

Like, in a race which has only one runner;

And I have run, with winning as my aim,

With no one else around I was the winner.

Now I appreciate that you could claim

That other people race, and are alive

But I have never seen or known the proof.

“To speculate, to slow down and to think

About what other people are and do

Things that I do not know are happening,

As if I could inhabit their body,

Takes the imagination to the brink.

There is no other person here but me.

Believing in the Lord is to begin

To see the world within a lonely man.

“There is no dialectic out from this.

Existence simply is won in a race

Cross country, me alone, and just one prize.

Like a hermaphrodite whose fruitfulness

Requires no oppositional eros,

Wanting no thing and suffering no stress.

I have been dead and now I am reborn

Knowing the world was made for me alone.

“I have a self and that can never die

Immortal is what the self is in the end.

But this is just a borrowed potency

I could not find myself, I could not find

What being human is by my own way

But only when my Lord was close at hand

And showed the way. In his adventures here

My guide and God alone made these things clear.

“He gave me self, the which is personal.

So uncontrolled, in error much to much,

So wayward and so lacking in control,

I never could have turned and met my match.

How would I have succeeded after all

In finding what I am in deep research

Unless someone had shown me how to turn

To be converted and to be reborn?

“Recall the central place that you are in

And the eternal basis of your place:

Nothing is real, all things are weak and thin.

To pity them is in the gift of choice.

That’s what he said to do and I have done.

Because, stood central in the universe,

To nothing do is what is best of all

Where all is thin and nothing else is real.

“Why love them? And how deal with all this stuff?

Unforced, but choosing, I would choose to care

And build. For this, the daughter that I love,

I choose to love her and to care for her.

My homeland, what does my homeland deserve,

After the prejudice that I suffer?

It is nothing in itself but land and water

Nothing intrinsically seems to matter.

“Why should I care, except that God gave it?

It is eternally to be cared for.

So I, the only real, in my despite,

Accept responsibility for her,

Knowing that I am king and petty god

And ought to do the right thing as the heir

In my kingdom. For nothing else is real

But me. And God, Holy and Immortal.”

Those were the things I thought when I awoke.

I tell them here as if I spoke aloud.

Now I have finished two thirds of the book

That I have written. That I was inspired

I will not claim. Have I been seen to invoke

The Holy Spirit to provide a word?

But that is what I have do quite soon

When I proceed to tell you about Heaven.