Only My Children Can Build a Temple

Avatar Adi Da Samraj

from Crazy Da Must Sing, Inclined To His Weaker Side:
Confessional Poems of Liberation and Love
1982

No one like me has appeared in this place before.
Am I only to live and die,
and thus feed the earth?
Should I only live and die,
and thus create the mystery of a holy ground?
Will generations pass this place
of my dilemmas,
feel the movements under foot
and never know the reasons
and the meaning
of the currents of bliss that fill them?
Will the earth itself
perform my only shout?
Will the rot of my few bodies
be my only song?
Will no one understand?
Will all of this,
even the holy ground,
fall unknown into the sea,
without a parcel of my living left
to heal the feet of pilgrims?
No one else can suffer the mysteries of my birth
or death.
And only my own children
can build a temple
where I rise and fall.[1]

RETURN TO "ADI DA'S DIVINE MAHASAMADHI
AND ADIDAM IN PERPETUITY"

FOOTNOTES

[1]

"I rise and fall" poetically echoes "my birth or death" in the previous line, suggesting an intentional correspondence between "birth" and "rise"; and "death" and "fall". Read The Death and Birth Of the God-Man for a possible interpretation of "fall" that is positive (in accord with the sense of the poem, which contrasts the presumably positive "building of a temple where I rise and fall" with the negative alternative painted by the rest of the poem).