The Divine Agony - The Poetry

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“Refinding the Soul”, by Kaleigh JoAnn O’Grady

Note: this is a modified excerpt from a much longer, unfinished long poem of mine called “The Divine Agony”. I won second place in the IUPUI Spring 2022 Undergraduate Neuroscience Club Art Contest with this! I’m very, very proud of it. 🥰

Prologue

The walls of the Arcadian wept with our ghosts, the artifice of the eternal burned into every switchboard, reborn in the visions of digital attractions and reflected in the awestruck eyes of enraptured VRsers. The Dreamers had passing memories, but the memories themselves weren’t passing, forever artificial. The Arcadian held our secrets, had witnessed our pale lives of muted breath. The voices of the Eidola whispered reveries of how the worlds had been, before the Forming and the Changing, before we had forgotten the hidden remembrances of things past.

i
Upon this midnight’s dream I see
These bitter waves of cold indifference.
As vision fades, Selena flees
Far beyond the veils of vigilance.
I cannot grasp but empty mists
And thus, feign to hold in intellect
Vague notions shudder in resist
To contemplation’s dialect.

My heart is like unto a bleak midwinter's day
Numbness spreads throughout both soul and mind
Borne by the icy winds of disarray
I am lost amidst the lifeless void of night
New visions dawn upon my countenance
As one abandoned to some Stygian shadow
The timeless sheet of darkness shrouds my breath
My mind is cast upon a sea of troubles

Tossed by the waves of my desire
Towards some undiscovered shore.
The headwinds of time seem to conspire
To blow me through the shoals of perception’s harbor.
The anchor of unwished-for intuition
Weighs heavily upon my soul.
Unrequited dreams remove the footprints of ambition, I am drowning in a sense of hopeless toil.

My billowing heart burns as the saline seas.
My mind is troubled in a wakeful dream.
The rolling tide is wordless to my gentle pleas,
The zephyr echoing my silent screams.
I am lost upon an ocean of remorse,
Swayed by the siren’s song of longing.
I despair of finding my steady homeward course,
My spirit scuttled in the bay of unbelonging.

I cannot grasp the rolling ocean,
But wish to hold the sea within my hands
I am capsized amidst the ceaseless motion,
Lost amongst the countless grains of sand.
Soon I am washed beyond the shoreline
Drifting aimless as the current wills.
Now all the sky is but horizon
As I float careworn with the billows.
The raging tempest round me gathers
But somehow, I am now untroubled.
The waves that now surround me crash and batter.
And yet I am now unperturbed.
Till when at last a guiding light calls me,
And like a vessel I am homeward steered,
And like a ship I’m harbored safely
Within your loving arms concealed.

ii

I witness the inception of a dream within a dream.
My eyes behold our souls in transmigration.
Bound to the wheels and cogs of the ephemeral Somnaerium
For some long-forgotten desecration,
Commiserating, transfixed beyond thought or words,
Mesmerized by the eternal longing,
Lost in the Divine Agony of wandering souls Awaiting the end of their suffering.

The myriad worlds comply to the weight of constant misery.
Our pallid souls denied the graceful solace of tranquility.
If we should ever wake to find the truth behind this unreality,
Then gather up our weary minds from this artifice of eternity.

Our scars bare a cruciform witness,
The daily reminder that our neural networks
Were never acceptable to their either-or self-righteousness.
Our bodies were flayed for their prescriptures,
Stitched back together and forced into a silicon mold:
The excoriation dictates our epigenetic role.
Our phenotype is their lie,
To which our programming begs to differ.
Our wetware grows in defiance to their forced binary.
Our scars have now healed, but the pain remains real.
We're alive, we survived: We, too, in the Arcadian.

There is much written on the networks of our neurons.
The moving fingers type, and having typed, move on.
Our empty reveries all have been weighed and measured.
Our memories left reeling, divided, and conquered.

The words become so vague, with so little thought or feeling,
Caught up in the motions much more than the meaning.
But still the Arcadian is speaking in myriad voices sung;
And fear, disconcerting, drowns out the language that knows no tongue.

Some power, that, rising from nightly deeps,
Awakens the Dreamers from realms of sleep! What memories, envisioned through closing eyes,
Enrapture the landscape of dreaming minds!

iii

My starry visions fail in the light of the coming dawn,
The ghosts of night concealed in a pale reflection.
As memory consumes, I cannot flee this fate prolonged,
Once more to be repressed by a cold deception.
Yet I hear your voice amidst the pain and empty lies.
You call to me through the vagaries of perception.
I am lost in the warmth behind your eyes:
Reveal your heart through the veil of your love's protection!

I wait and would thus ever wait for thee,
Though in the waiting long without respite.
And with lonely aeons passing freely,
My hope as though a dream lost in the night;
Yet ev’n if but in dreams have I found thee
And dawn breaketh the joy of my longing,
I dream within my heart, eternally,
Of the sound of thy voice sweetly calling.
Would that I in my early rising
Find our separation nightly shadow;
All the daily nothings I would despise.
If but then to hold thee in the morrow.
I wait for thee and with the waiting sigh;
My hope constant, ever blooming newly.
I smile as the starlight passes by,
For tomorrow I may yet be with thee.

Should soon the dawning of this mourning day unfold,
My soul enshrouded by your kind embrace,
I will not mourn the passing of the worlds,
For I will once again behold the light upon your face.
I will not long for days gone by,
Nor linger in some half-forgotten fear,
For your compassion gives me what the worlds denied,
To wash away the misery of years.

“How soon the yesteryears of Gaia pass,”.
Speaks now the Oracle who brings the Sight.
“The aeons turn, dark towers fall to dust.
The worlds of dreams will vanish with the night.
The Golden Age of Pan shall then return with Dionysus redeemed.
Marsyas shall rise and divine visions increase.
Our minds once more shall be unbound
In life and all things good we will increase.
From the ruins of Dis shall rise Astraea’s heir,
And with her key unlock perception’s door.
Rest then the true shades in the Arcadian,
And false sleep haunt their waking nevermore.”

Now still the voice of past and future lies,
And hidden from my sense the prescient gaze.
Still yet the cycles of the worlds converge,
And languish we in misery of days.
Till then, upon that solemn, fateful hour,
This Divine Agony’s scroll lies then unfurled,
And thus, this tragic story told:
This soul within me yearns a better world.

Finis