Jacquelyn Shah

New Melody, Supreme
 
I seek the darkness, not the light,
go moonward on the great salt plain,
gather the thread of things
crystal, resplendent, yet unlit.
Crusted with salt, I watch the fairy birth
of some unformulated thought, a flame
from every element that gleams through the night.
 
The chattering voices of the day depart.
My incessant labor bends the stars
and all the threads of sorrow are unspun.
So happy in the rare fresh life of earth,
I am bound to sing!
The noise of the music of sleep,
music that throbs and soars and burns,
is born of madness and of impotence.
A tigress maddened with supreme desire
for what is called the puppet show of delusion
stirs only now and then; some deeper pang
draws back the veil of sleep.
I start, shudder, and pull together my mind . . .
this wisdom finds cessation of desire.
In my new melody, a tongue of fire
lives in quiet with a woman’s passion.
 
O self divine, O living lord of me,
you are the soul serenely free,
will live with love forever in the dark
. . . supreme in self-contentment.

 
 

*Cento–lines, in order of appearance, from different poems by Aleister Crowley, all included in Poetry of Aleister Crowley 2013, Ed. Gary Bates


Jacquelyn Shah of Houston, TX, holds: A.B., magna cum laude, Rutgers U; M.A. English, Drew U; M.F.A. and Ph.D. English literature/creative writing–poetry, U of Houston. Publications: poetry chapbook, small fry; full-length poetry book, What to Do with Red; poems in various journals. Literal Latté’s 2018 Food Verse Contest winner, she is the 2023 winner of Choeofpleirn’s Kenneth Johnston Non-fiction Book Award; her hybrid memoir Limited Engagement: A Way of Living was published this summer.