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    Poems of Death: Time for Eternity
    Poems of Death: Time for Eternity
    Poems of Death: Time for Eternity
    Ebook72 pages1 hour

    Poems of Death: Time for Eternity

    By James Hilgendorf

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    About this ebook

    Fifty-seven short pieces about the future of America, & the American Dream. The title refers to a passage in Walt Whitman's "Democratic Vistas", in which he states: "In the future of these States, must arise poets immenser far, and make great poems of death." Not poems as such, these poetic prose pieces explore a dimension of eternity and a new spirituality that is beginning to emerge in America.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJames Hilgendorf
    Release dateMay 9, 2014
    ISBN9781311898227
    Poems of Death: Time for Eternity
    Author

    James Hilgendorf

    James Hilgendorf is the author of nine books - "Life & Death: A Buddhist Perspective", "The Great New Emerging Civilization", "The New Superpower", "The Buddha and the Dream of America", "A New Myth for America", "Poems of Death: Time for Eternity", "Handbook for Youth in a Muddied Age", "Maybe We Need a New Religion", and "Forever Here". He is also the producer of The Tribute Series, a series of highly-acclaimed travel films that are in homes, libraries, and schools all across the United States, several of which have appeared on PBs and international television.

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      Book preview

      Poems of Death - James Hilgendorf

      Poems of Death

      by

      James Hilgendorf

      *****

      Published by James Hilgendorf at Smashwords

      Poems of Death

      Copyright 2013 James Hilgendorf

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      ******

      Poems of Death

      ******

      In the future of these States must arise poets immenser far, and make great poems of death. - Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas.

      ******

      Prelude

      The true spirit of America is something as yet unimagined.

      We talk about the spirit of '76, and imagine fifes and drums marching through woods and over dales, and clouds of battle smoke, and coming through it all with victory and the cry of a new land and smiling faces.

      But it is nothing of the kind. We have barely even heard of the real America.

      Our eyes focus on dreams of money and success, movie stars, lottery tickets won, song contests, smart phones, video games, super bowls, automobile advertisements, but it is all peripheral chatter, white noise in the background of something unsung and lovely beyond words, a buried memory deep in all of our lives, of unspoken words, forgotten connections of the heart.

      It is something only hinted at, in the most mundane and simple affairs...

      A young father gazes down with wonder at his two-year-old son propped on his knee. It has been a long work day at the factory, and the father sits and breathes slowly the warm, humid air.

      There is a aura of lost dreams already about this young man, sensing his job at a dead end, lost chances.

      But now something unexpected has moved into the orbit of his awareness, a son, born of his own body and blood, a work of extraordinary wonder surfaced from the humdrum monotony of the day.

      And he looks and he awakens to something beyond himself, to another self and life, his heart beats beyond itself now, the bondage of his own pain and worry breaking into another dimension, someone else, another dream, clear brown eyes and a dimple and tiny hands and feet and the look of recognition and love directed back to himself from that little body. It is a miracle.

      What dreams can then unfold?

      It is a story of endurance almost beyond the ability to endure, the beginning of a new story taking root in the soil of the parent and beginning to struggle and reach for the sky and the light and the sun, a new direction for the age-old story of life.

      It is America blooming.

      The spirit of the real America lies in such simple, ordinary things - ordinary things about to be transformed into extraordinary things. The America that has forever escaped our inward eye.

      We are here forever. This is our home. Though the galaxies and dark holes and symmetrical universes stretch out beyond even our imagining, they are merely our face in the mirror. Each of us is looking into a mirror.

      Seven billion people and seven billion mirrors, and universes and space and time within and without beyond comprehension.

      America coming into its own.

      Time for eternity.

      ******

      Roots

      Echoes of early America and the nascent American spirit reverberate still through the landscape, though lost now mostly in the din and cacophony of modern life.

      The real America was always a matter of the spirit, beyond politics or economics, and on which politics and economics ultimately rested.

      It was a dream buried in the heart of America, waiting for expression.

      We had our own bards - Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and others - progenitors of the early American Renaissance - who wrote of this dream.

      People will say that this was long ago, that times have changed forever, and today we live in a modern world, more complex, incapable of reverting to the simplicity of those earlier days.

      But theirs was our seminal dream. It was never about an earlier time, or a later, more complex, time, but of eternity present at each moment of life.

      Thoreau wrote:

      The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised...no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed. That time which we really improve, or which is improvable, is neither past, present, nor future.

      "Time is but the stream I go fishing in. I drink at it, but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.

      All around him, even in that simpler and more remote time, he saw

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