HUNGER
Hunger, I have known your pangs,
the gnawing urge, the ceaseless demand
from beginning to end;
inevitable as air and light,
as rain and seed and soil, as tides
and seasons; the perpetual cause
of all that moves and is moved; the force
that flows through stars and men.
We are born hungry. Begins
the appetite with warmth and tit,
with wombskin quivering yet
from cry replying cry, then another sense
commands another hunger fed
to feed the next and the next, each heir
and progenitor of this past,
that future, and the cycle reset.
Hungry pilgrims, we can not rest.
Distance is but another nearness,
as soon met, then shorelines bend
and we must home again
to other journeys, our Eden
faith a continual repetition
of arks and floods from which none
returns invulnerable, the apple bitten.
Creed, color, race, we have all sworn
allegiance, fought bitter wars,
tasted glory and gall
for insatiable gods deified
by our own hungers; with rites and sacrifice
made bread and wine from flesh and blood
that we might have eternal food
here and hereafter, immortal.
We are fed by desire
and consumed like the fire
on our tongues, in our hearts;
a flame forever unappeased
by our words, symbols, deeds
or monuments; the phoenix, man himself,
recreated from his own ashes
out of hungering dreams and parched.
We live with hunger always,
that fearfilling, painpinching cave
wherein we hide like hunted stags,
lips dry, but tasting heroically
of miracles... Who has not seen
visionary lions fall to dust
and, scornful of the world's ambition,
left the hunters truth in rags?
Fish, birds, beasts, all are prey
to the same illusion, all wake
to the hunger that stalks and prowls.
Sands thirst for unquenchable seas,
plains thrust toward implacable peaks,
time moves unfulfilled and blind
from plans unrealized to those surprised.
We die hungry even while hyenas howl.