The Jungle God

The path led through arm thick bamboo,
Up past open glades on that small mountain,
To sit that glad night through
Huddled with Sarah against the wet mist.
Talking on the strange emptiness
At the middle of things.
Pondering slowly,
In the dark Jungle,
On the mysteries.

Then, talking still,
We walked back down
That oriental mount.
On paths worn smooth
By human feet
Through millennia’s use.
Through jungle strange with night,
Sensing our way,
We came upon a dim glade.

We stopped – awe full.
Around us,
Around the central phallic column of stone,
Rising from its Lotus base,
Buzzing power.
Breathless we stood,
Anxious, wondering,
Confronting a sense of death,
An unknown force,
Perhaps a being.

Unprepared, we had stumbled
Into a temple without walls,
A living shrine to a jungle deity,
A god, alive and felt.
Sarah, stunned,
With a presentiment of death,
Stood facing that dark doorway
Known to us all,
Though often mist obscured.
And I, amazed,
And penetrated by the presence,
Stepped slowly forward,
To know it better.
And in its voiceless way it spoke.

It was the timeless jungle life,
Growth, decay, death and renewal.
Forever changing,
Forever the same,
Focused, there in the stone,
Through the ages,
By men and women who,
As we, had pondered the mysteries,
Venerated the stone,
And honoured the traces
Left by past minds.
Traces of perception
And collective wisdom,
Into decay and renewal,
Into life and death.

The forces of the jungle,
And the worshipful mind,
Focused beyond the small view
Of personal existence,
Had glimpsed the great cycles,
The one in the many,
The timeless in the changing,
And fused, they became
This jungle God.
A God evolving and existing
Through countless generations.
The jungle, the collective mind,
Shining through the stone,
In the jungle dimness.

Then it was done.
We were alone again,
In the dark trees,
With the cold stone.

Copyright ©2003 Tony Crisp