Chimeras (after Nag Hammadi)
Son of the ineffable silence, let this be the one true space
Where answers do not need answering. Where the male-female
Drinks freely above the palms, and where light and dark do not gather
Mind. You are pre-existent, un-begotten.
You wear the clear garment of insight. Your truth shall not undo
Sign from shadow, nor pass in ignorance over unrighteous water.
Death won’t be final, ever again,
Its gaze will pass over you at the second sunset.
Let the living spirit who is singular, furl her fire around your loins,
Womb to cloud, where astonishment shines, and where
Chaos has been bound.
This is the middle silence of the air, where ineffable love met evil,
Vanquished it, and drove female intercourse and male perdition
Beyond the everlasting. This begins the cycle of forms.
Sorrow without grief. Every tear shall not be wiped away
When the day of our lord is at hand. We teach ourselves
To hunt down most chimeras.
~ Weyman Chan
Weyman Chan’s first book, Before a Blue Sky Moon, won the 2002 Writers Guild of Alberta Stephansson Poetry Award; his second book, Noise From the Laundry, was a finalist for the 2008 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. The poems included here are from his third book, Hypoderm, which will be published by Talonbooks in Spring, 2010.
“‘Home’ to me means any kind of real or imagined construct of familiarity, comfort or solace that I come to associate as part of who I am… so I then form emotional attachments to it: all of us need to build a sense of personal history, and finding a place to call home satisfies this deep, underlying need.”
Read more of Weyman Chan’s poetry:
– Near Milk River, looking for the Sweetgrass Hills
Editor’s note: This poem is from Home and Away – a sequel to the bestselling Writing the Land (2007). Look for one poet to be featured each day as Alberta poets ponder the question “what is home?†and explore our complex relationship with working on, living with, exploiting and protecting our land and our home. For more information about the project, click here.
Leave a Reply