‘The highest form of religiosity[...] holds the secrets of nature and the mystery of the Becoming Human (Menschwerdung) to be one and the same.’1
F.W.J. Schelling

The summer with her furious, fiery tongue
Did lick the heavens dry, and now despoils
The bones of old gods; one reanimate
Adam is obliged to span a borderland
Between earth and sky. Hollow Xanthicus
is resonant with life.

This soft Tree is easily overcome
by those arachnoid insinuations
That artifice themselves between the boughs.
Thirsty summer. Empty spring. Only thus,
waxing in our spaciousness, are we
reconciled unto thee.

The whistling wood prophesies to the wind,
Spinning temples in your hearing. Transfixed
upon the memory are the healing leaves
and fruits of every halfway happening
That has ever darkened the face of this
not-for-nothing flesh.

Wherefore do you seek, O son of man,
A voice among the reeds? A likeness in the azure?
The wisdom of the ages in your dreams…
For you are the dream and you are the sage,
the body and the temple and the tree,
the living thread suspending the fixed image
of this and every age.

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  1. F.W.J. Schelling, Philosophy of Revelation and Related Texts, trans. Klaus Ottmann (Thompson, Conn.: Spring Publications, 2020), 14.

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Daniel Nicholas teaches at a Steiner-Waldorf school in southern Oregon. He is currently working on his M. Ed. in Waldorf Education through Antioch University New England. In the not too distant past, he studied at Eastern University in Pennsylvania, served in higher education administration, and taught high school English in charter and public schools in Texas. Besides the trials and tasks of life in general, the seeds of his thought and poetry are gathered primarily from deep reading in the literature of Dostoevsky and the Russian Silver Age, themes in transcendental philosophy, and anthroposophy.

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