The Blue God

He made me a sharp-edged sword and hid me in the shadow of his arm.

In my youth, I was friends with a number of Hare Krishnas. Detroit, where I lived, had a sizable Krishna community and quite a number of the Krishna parents enrolled their children in the Waldorf school where I taught, only five or six miles from the temple housed in the old Fisher Mansion on the far east side of the city. The Krishnas were some of the best Christians I’ve ever known.

Once while meditating on Lake Huron in my mid-twenties—about five years before I became a Waldorf teacher—I had a vision of the Lord Kalki, the avatar of Vishnu who is promised to arrive at the end of the Kali Yuga to destroy the wickedness that will have engulfed the earth by that time. Some scholars, incidentally, connect the rise of the figure of Kalki in Vedanta as influenced by the image of the Pale Rider in the Book of Revelation. When I left the lake, I stopped at the Krishna temple. It was a Sunday and they usually offered a free feast on Sundays. But this day it was different. They were celebrating a festival—I think observing the appearance of one of Vishnu’s avatars (though I don’t recall which one). I mentioned my vision to one of my friends there, and he noted the curious synchronicity with the festival.

I don’t often think about that vision or imagination, but I did recently while scything in the meadow here. The poem below arose from my recent recollection of that time.

THE BLUE GOD

It is early to work the scythe, but the moist cool air 
Hangs thick and still and no dew dampens my boots. A storm 
Approaches from the east, and I hope it will end this drought.
The pastures are dry and sparse and the cow has little 
To graze which is why I cut marsh grass in its greenness 
This morning. 

		I remember seeing him, the giant, 
Blue and fierce, his sharpened sword lifted aloft, riding 
A white horse across Lake Huron from Ontario. 
I was twenty-five then and it was at The Beginning 
Of the End of All Things. 

			       The barn swallows and starlings 
Do not fly above the meadow today, but I see
A flurry of ants pillage the grease of the larvae 
Of a fallen paper wasp nest I crushed under heel 
On the porch steps yesterday. Thus we all, intended 
Or not, contribute to the perpetual cycling 
Of death and life. I wash out the stainless steel compost 
Bucket to rid the plague of fruit flies that has menaced 
Us in the kitchen these past days, and see a sticker
On the underside I had never paid attention
To before: “Made in India.” This makes me laugh.
 
							                                 He 
Looked angry as he crossed the lake, waves churning around 
The horse’s cannons, the wind rushing in its mane. Well, 
Maybe not angry, but severe, focused, commissioned, 
Foreboding.

	          After I hit a black walnut sapling 
With a clang, the scythe begs for sharpening; I set the snath’s 
Head on a boulder covered in dead grass and then sweep
The honing stone along the dulled blade to set the burr.
That dream I had last night, what was it? I remember: 
A voice that troubled the wind as I milked a she-deer 
On a winter’s night in the forest, the pail buried 
In snow, steam rising from the milk while the clustering 
Stars threw sparks through a hole in the deep canopy: He 
Made me a sharp-edged sword and hid me in the shadow 
Of his arm. 

	       But I wonder what he was telling me, 
The blue god, as he disturbed the Huron, moving west.
This was in the summer of 1987: 
Before Tiananmen Square, before Berlin, before we
Found ourselves placed in the possession of the Archons;
Before we were digitized, before we were silenced,
Before we were formed in the image and the likeness
Of a digital god in a garden of nothing.

I hear deep thunder as the storm comes creeping closer,
And realize it is time I finished this scythe-work.
There is no wisdom in tempting nature, no matter
How poetic the blade one holds. And yet I wonder
If the blue god still breaks the waves of the universe,
He who will kill by the millions the thieves and the rogues 
Who have dared to dress as kings in this Age of Darkness. 

Shambhala, birthplace of Lord Kalki.

Join me, Spencer Klavan, and Paul Vander Klay, and others in Washington, DC for Christ and Community, and Renewing Culture this July.