From great distance they arrive
Hazarding mountain tracks
Storms of sea and forest
Following promise of healing
A transformation wholly individual
By purification and dreams
Myth enactment and divination
It sounds too esoteric
All wish to walk away clean
Emerge at least with a manageable
Madness more suited to custom
Accommodating harvest commerce and a war
One previously admitted in distress
Of little social aptitude and financial isolation
Was found to be in fact
An undiagnosed lyric poet –
From living simply on her dreams and garden
Overnight she turned these into verse
Now she is plagued by brash extravagant suitors
So do not be so sure of your own holistic outcome
Some Psyche side-effects are unavoidable
Healing has so many sacred secret pools
Being of itself a Mystery
It seems the whole Hellenic world
Is on the verge of calling here
Escaping an unnatural extinction
Perhaps to seek a larger ‘God’
Not another hut constructed by a cult
Beside a busy river
They miss the watermark in all Creation
Better served by still and modest nature
They miss imagination
Soberly reflective sensitivity
And you wonder what can be renewed
You wonder at the outcome
.
Bernard Saint
Illustration: Claire Palmer
.