Reincarnation
In Life what hope is always unto men?
Stories of Arthur that shall come again
Cleansing the Earth in her eternal stain,
Elias, Charlemagne, Christ. What matter then?
What matter who, or how, or even when?
If we but look beyond the primal pain
And trust the Future to write all things plain
Graven on brass with the predestined pen.
This is the doom. Upon the blind blue sky
A little cloud, no larger then a hand.
Whether I live and love, or love and die,
I care not; either way I understand.
To me – to live is Christ; to die is gain
For, I also, I shall come again.
Aleister Crowley (1875-1947)
Or...
We have been here before
I think I remember this moorland,
The tower on the top of the tor;
I feel in the distance another existence:
I think I have been here before.
And I think you were sitting beside me,
In a fold in the face of the fell,
For Time at its work'll go round in a circle,
And what is befalling, befell.
“I have been here before!” I asserted,
In a nook on the neck of the Nile.
I once in a crisis was punished by Isis,
And you smiled. I remember your smile.
I had the same sense of persistence
On the site of the seat of the Sioux;
I heard in the teepee the sound of a sleepy
Pleistocene grunt. It was you.
The past made a promise, before it
Began to begin to begone.
This limited gamut brings you again. Damn it.
How long has this got to go on?
Morris Bishop (1893-1973)
