Rudolf Steiner's Vision for the Future - Anthroposophical Society in ...

Elusive are your thoughts, indeed your name
Remains unspeakably beyond my grasp;
Your coy smile murmurs that it is your youth
And my unworthiness before your fame
(Which many vainly strive to clasp)
That guard as indecipherable your truth,
Though suitors, who draw near your
countenance to seek,
Report you look familiar—nay, antique.
And so you push me back on my resources
And advise me to enroll in study-courses;
Practice multi-paneled meditations,
Cultivate unceasing patience;
Shun all pessimistic curses;
Memorize occultic verses,
Think of paper-clips in German,
And compose a weekly sermon;
Twist in soul-depths’ calisthenics,
Focused as a schizophrenic’s;
Sharpen what my chakras see,
Judge no-one’s hypocrisy;
Join a fourfold doctor’s patients
Planning better incarnations
Than lives spent midst Huns and Vandals,
And discard my shoes for sandals;
Lend kind ear to every dullard,
Keep my wardrobe pastel-colored;
92 • being human
To His Pedagogic Mistress
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
Whatever noble ancestry, or none, be yours,
I strain to bind myself to your ideals,
Whose grim austerity—you claim—will elevate my state;
You sparkle as a timeless treasure we affix our eyes on,
Albeit, truth to tell, each rocky path toward you feels,
Although it sternly beckons, that your gate
Recedes from my approach like the horizon,
While you insist that my resulting grief and anger
Is but the smudgy aura of my Doppelgänger.
And yet your vestal nature, self-created,
Phoenix- or Athena-like (you say) in every crisis,
Bears bright beauty to assuage my care,
Which somehow still remains unsated,
While, autonomous as Isis,
Though your lineage might seem to be from here and there,
You never come within my reach,
But stay aloof, and merely teach, and teach, and... teach.
Compost by the stars and moon,
Dining, neither late nor soon,
Wholly upon daily grains;
Cogently retrace migraines
To indiscretions Hyperborean,
Or of some passionate Victorian,
Or as product metamorphic
Of a dissonantal Orphic.
Yet this weaving in conceiving
Seems to point toward your leaving!
Seeing how it should behoove me
Constantly to self-improve me,
Till at last I come to see ya…
Vanish, Anthroposophia,
Off to lure, through spirit-science,
Your next swain into self-reliance.
Michael Ronall
Spring Valley, NY