The 99 Poem Challenge
Fox-Trot-9

98. Canzone — The Light Within

And you also were included in Christ when you heard the world of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit.
—Ephesians 1:13

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
—Ephesians 6:12

1

Can you discern the fiction from the fact?
   In all your television screens, explosion
After explosion rocks our world of fact
And sends us down the rabbit hole. But fact
   And fiction share a common tie removed
From our mundane participation. Fact
Does not explain but just assumes the fact
   That you are blind in your so-called awareness
   Of what goes on behind closed doors. Awareness
Is just the pictures on the screen and fact
   Is just the headline spun in dressed-up lies
   That masquerade as truth, but they are lies.

2

Can you discern the truth inside these lies?
   Beyond the thin veneer of touted fact
Lies a hidden world of ugly truth. The lies
You daily hear repeated are but lies
   Meant to conceal the truth of each explosion,
Setting the world ablaze with yet more lies,
Lies upon lies, rumors of lies, with lies
   To keep you in the dark so far removed
   From third-world suffering, so far removed
From God. You find such comfort in these lies
   That you're contented with your false awareness.
   So why do you now question that awareness?

3

There lies beyond that veil of dim awareness
   A looming truth that lurks within the lies,
A truth that drives away that false awareness
And leaks a subtle stream of true awareness
   Into the heart and mind and soul as fact.
All's not as it once seemed. This new awareness
Dispels your luxuries! This grim awareness
   Fills up your heart with dread of each explosion
   Covered in breaking headlines. Each explosion
Adds to the daily spin of false awareness,
   In which each scrap of truth has been removed
   And knowers of the truth have been removed.

4

Regret burns in your heart. You want removed
   The blazing horrors of this new awareness,
Yearning for ignorance that once removed
You from your petty fears. You are removed
   From all the comforts of their subtle lies,
Condemned to silence lest you be removed
From everyone you love, so far removed
   From everything you love. The very fact
   That you cannot un-think this damning fact
Has you condemned to live so far removed
   From that complacency where each explosion
   Is nothing but a terrorist explosion.

5

But there is yet another great explosion
   Of waking hearts and minds that have removed
The binds of resignation, an explosion
Of insight and disclosure, an explosion
   Of infinite discernment and awareness,
A time of Revelation's great explosion!
We know that every televised explosion
   Has been revealed to be a string of lies,
   And so you're not alone. We know the lies
That have been fed to us with each explosion,
   But are you now prepared to know the fact?
   Can you discern the truth inside the fact?

(Envoi)

Now that you know the fiction from the fact,
   Now that you know the truth in each explosion,
      Let's have that final barrier removed,
         The barrier of fear in your awareness.
            Fear not the light within that quells the lies!

(To be continued...)

A/N: The canzone is an Italian form with strong similarities to the sestina. There are no rhymes; instead there are five keywords that determine the structure of the poem. Every line of the poem—and there are 65 lines altogether—ends with one of the keywords, which must appear in a prescribed order. As such, there are five stanzas of twelve lines each, followed by a five-line envoi.

Meter: (Varies) Iambic pentameter
Rhyme:

Stanza 1: ABAACAADDAEE
Stanza 2: EAEEBEECCEDD
Stanza 3: DEDDADDBBDCC
Stanza 4: CDCCECCAACBB
Stanza 5: BCBBDBBEEBAA
Stanza 6 (Envoi): ABCDE