poetry of rapture
Here is a poem I read at age 17. It prefaces one of my favorite books, Magical Child Matures by Joseph Chilton Pearce. It took all this time to start seeing the meaning. If ever there were a poem of rapture, this is it.
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If I Could Only Live at the Pitch That is Near Madness
Richard Eberhart
If I could only live at the pitch that is near madness
When everything is as it was in my childhood
Violent, vivid, and of infinite possibility:
That the sun and the moon broke over my head.
Then I cast time out of the trees and fields.
Then I stood immaculate in the Ego;
Then I eyed the world with all delight,
Reality was the perfection of my sight.
And time has big handles on the hands,
Fields and trees a way of being themselves.
I saw battalions of the race of mankind
Standing solid, demanding a moral answer.
I gave the moral answer and I died
And into a realm of complexity came
Where nothing is possible but necessity
And the truth wailing there like a red babe.