The Wars of Love, An Epic Poem
By Charles Upton
Pub Date: Upcoming
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Binding: Paper.
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Related Books: Literature, Poetry, Prose and Thought

Charles Upton's epic poem, The Wars of Love will be published soon. Here are some excerpts.

The greatest beauty 
Is the beauty of the Invisible,

There's nowhere to turn
To take hold of Or behold it.
Like a smell,
It comes from somewhere beyond directions,

You find it
By being the place
In which you've always known it.

Layla--that's just what she's like. 
Her name has to be Night,
Because the light of day, unless it falls
On some mote of dust that
Thinks it has a name, Is black as midnight.

Night is Koran--night
And all the stars.
The stars are the Book,
But night is the Mother of the Book.

She divests herself, when the recitation is ended;
Undoes the strings of existence
And drops it, like a robe.

When the lights went out
In the great banquet-hall
Where all the people I had ever known
Or ever would know
Were being entertained after dinner
By the two black-faced fuqara
Directing the spectacle
Of death and resurrection,

That was Her.
Ever since that night
I have been a slave
Of the unseen beauty.

It is madness to cross the ocean
Looking for the ocean itself, 
Madness to find a direction
That doesn't appear
On either the globe or the compass, 
And then turn toward it deliberately;
Such things are not done.

But when night comes, and the wind drops
And the calm ocean reflects
The mazes of the stars,
Why not leave cloak of your existence
On the deck of the ship,
And dive, in your madness,
Into the glossy black water
That has carried you for fifty years
On the strict count of your breath,
And reach the Midnight Sun?

When I was a man, I had no Self but God;
Now I am the Self of every woman and every man,
One with all who walk the path of Nothing.
Those who have become Nothing before they die
Have no Self but I. I am the road the stars travel
Before the face of their Lord. I am a ladder seen in a dream;
Angels ascend and descend upon me;
My flesh is a highway of living intelligence.
When the seven seas rise like sap
Through the bark of the olive, changed into liquid light,
There I will stand, in neither the east nor the west.
When God summons the four winds back to His chamber,
Calling them each by its name,
I will be the body of that vast, returning sigh.

To visit God is to spend the night inside the Sun,
The Sun who hears and sees, without sleep.
So shed the world, and open the gates of dawn:
The Sun is about to rise for the last time,
Climbing the green balconies of Axis Mundi, the luminous steps, Gathering in the fruit of what has been,
Storing away the seeds of what shall be,
Till it stands on the floor of high eternity, the Temple Mount And prostrates itself before the throne
Of the Light which does not set.