Acusmata Things Heard
Joe Gonnella
©2020 Joe Gonnella JoeGonnella.com
Acusmata = “things heard”
There are no ideas but Those we hold in common.
Embrace dying when your time comes.
Caught in body’s prism, soul must pay the penalty— no escape, except by his command who owns us as a shepherd owns a herd.
To buy and sell is base; to compete, better; but best, is to observe.
Knowledge liberates from birth’s network— leaves us who we are within the confines of a body to whom we owe our allegiance but from whom, despite all attachment, we must transcend.
As medicine heals, so music cleanses.
A head chock full of ready answers will miss the unasked question at the center of a life.
My father delicately cut the gems he mined— incised his name on them so no man after him could forget who had come before.
By the clutch of a bean a king can come to be.
Men drown when they reveal what others wish concealed.
Knowledge without know how leads to no foundation.
By the air I breathe, by the water I drink, silence is an augury of what’s to come.
His silence is the silence at the center of a void. His voice is the voice of a ghost no one would willingly hear.
The wicked dead, with their chaotic minds, pay their penalty on earth before they fall to hell. Those who are guilty of crimes in heaven shall have no rest in death. Necessity will judge them condemned anew each day— the work they do thereafter no one, alive or dead, would willingly witness.
Sun shines forever on the good. Day is balanced by perfect night. Labor weighs easily on lives well lived. Soil plows itself. Seas sleep and do not weep. Like eagles rising on mountain thermals, past time’s defeated tower, good souls ascend Zeus’s stair, bathed in cleansing starlight. They are guided to the islands of the blessed by loved ones who had gone before whose hands unlock the gates their kin can’t be kept from entering.
Brother to beasts, sister to snakes, I am kin beneath the skin to everything that breathes in harmony with stars.
If immortality in this life is not an option, beg of Hermes that you keep your memories in the life you enter hereafter.
Knowledge is not renewal. In the end, for all our striving, birth’s variables equal death’s constant.
Hesiod is chained to his pillar. Homer is hung from a snake infested tree. Thales drowns in a puddle. My teeth, when freed from the bones where they rest, are seeds to plant a harvest on whose sustaining fruits tomorrow’s children will feast.
Lord, Lord, leave me alone. What began as process retires to a bone.
Other Islands Press OtherIslandsPress.tumblr.com Handmade Editions
