The fire that burns in me today
Will also burn in me tomorrow
In all derangement and all sorrow
Its shadows shall the walls display.

Outside the opening of a cave
Or out of the volcanic crater
Is seen the truth of higher nature
And everything that it may save.

It is in everything that's true
And also everything apparent -
The sky, illumined and transparent,
Alit in pink and white and blue -

Reflects him as though through a prism
And into multi-colored splednor
The universal truth is rendered,
Like lava bursting through the schisms.

The fire that burns in me today -
A spark of all-consuming plasma -
Will percolate like a miasma
Into the place where shadows play -

Will burn the skin of all therein
And fill their noses full of poison
And make the place destroyed and noisome
Until in cave they can't remain;

But burst into the higher mind
From higher mind to higher senses
And as their spirit-form advances
They see the sun, but go not blind -

But burn through stone, through barren rock
And smash and tear and rise to passion
Shaking the earth like a concussion
And time resetting like a clock.

Water in heights; in water, heights -
In heights of mind exists life's essence
And in its gentle incandescence
At truth of universe arrives

In water, heights; and as its waves
Engulf, carress the restless kernel
Etheric merges with infernal
To cleanse the confines of the cave,

And send its members through the core -
Into the ever-waiting heaven -
And then return into the cavern,
This to repeat forevermore.

Ilya Shambat
https://sites.google.com/site/ibshambatpoetry