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Title: Give Over, O Sea!
Author: Cale Young Rice [
More Titles by Rice]
Give over, O sea! You never shall reach Nirvana!
Your tides, like the tidal generations, ever shall rise and fall,
And your infinite waves find birth, rebirth, and billowy dissolution.
The years of your existence are unending.
The years of your unresting are forever.
The sun, who is desire, ever begets in you his passion,
And the moon is ever drawing you, with silvery soft alluring,
To surge and sway, to wander and fret, to waste yourself in foam.
So Buddha-calm shall never descend upon you.
And tho it may often seem you have found the Way,
Your tempest-sins return and quicken to wild reincarnations,
And again great life, pulsing and perilous,
Omnipotent life, that ever resurges thro the universe,
Lashes you back to striving, back to yearning, back to speech.
To utterance on all shores of the world
Of things unutterable.
Give over then, you never shall reach Nirvana!
Nor I, who am your acolyte for a moment;
Who swing a censer of fragrant words before your priestly feet,
That tread these altar-rocks, bedraped with weeds gently afloat,
And with the wild flutter of gulls wildly mysterious.
Give over and call your winds again to join you!
O chanter of deep enchantments, of uncharted litanies,
Call them and bid them say with you that life transcends retreat,
And that, in the temple of its Immanence,
There is no peace that does not spring daily from peacelessness,
And no Nirvana save in the lee of storm.
[The end]
Cale Young Rice's poem: Give Over, O Sea!
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