THE OUTER SUBURBS

We might be told to ignore our dreams
and discount the rainbow.
A cold, winking star, nameless and infinitely remote,
might be given us as sole comfort,
or a dull black stone.
-Roger White, �Question�, Occasions of Grace, George Ronald, 1992, p.61.


The answer is not that it is difficult
not that there are hazards abounding,
but that an empty, bland, yawning gulf
drifts--we call it liberation:
the great gap between an old authority
and a creative substitute;
how to make use of our new freedom-
bright-coloured patches and
grey-black patterns in symbiosis.
A cavernous abyss, tall precipice,
yawns before us as we sleep,
as we try to find the canvass
on which to paint the picture-
from drift to mastery-with our lives.*

Patterns of feeling and meaning
can only fill some of the infinitely
cold spaces from here to eternity,
distant stars, nameless planets
and the miles and miles between us
along roads that I keep travelling
and will never do again.

Perhaps this emptiness is for the heart
where inner mysteries unfold
and love and hate must not take root.
Perhaps it is in these cold and barren places
that truth unwinds and error is defined.
Perhaps here it is that the lamp of search,
earnest striving, devotion, rapture and ecstacy,
find their home, their roots, their spacious dwellings,
in these cold, clinical and distant planes
where the City of God finds its outer suburbs;
where the heart begins its slow, infinitely slow
journey to the brighter lights of some downtown;
where there is satisfaction
that fattens and appeases the hunger;
where the fragrant trees and flowers,
the familiar friends and sublime embers
warm me by the fire; where You lay waiting
with love, more than I have known.

Ron Price
10 September 1995

* From Drift to Mastery--one of the books written by the great American journalist Walter Lippman.