I

I sought you first for splendour—
as boys seek brass upon the breast, or lovers seek a name
carved deep in bark to outlast weather.
I wanted the shining proof of you,
a bright device to wear above my ordinary days,
and set my heart between two inward columns
as if a hall could be raised by pride alone.
I hung my silence with imaginary banners,
and called the trembling in my blood reverence.

Yet you came, not with trumpets,
but with the mild insistence of a wick finding its oil—
a low flame, honey-coloured, patient as a bee’s work,
and all my finery turned in that light
to something thin, like gilt on cheap wood.
The brighter the lamp, the clearer the dust.

II

I sought you then for comfort—
as the tired seek a threshold and a basin of cool water,
as one pursued by winter seeks any room that holds a little heat.
I asked for the gentle part of mystery:
a charm to set against grief,
a spell to blunt the tooth of memory,
a soft hand laid across the brow.

And you were gentle:
your warmth was like beeswax melting—
a scent of old books, cedar, and clean linen;
your hush was the hush before a vow,
the hush that gathers when a circle closes
and even the proudest breath grows careful.
But comfort is a veil, and you—
you are the lifting of veils.

You widened, you steadied;
you leaned your clarity upon me as moonlight leans
upon a floor of dark and pale—
and what I called “peace” turned to seeing.
The brighter the lamp, the clearer the dust.

III

O light, you were never ornament.
You were the true angle set against the tongue,
the cold arc of a compass drawn around desire,
the plumb-line dropped straight through the chest
to sound what lies beneath the speech of virtue.
You measured me without malice—
as a star measures a traveller,
as a tide measures a shore.

I began to fear you, then—
not as men fear thunder,
but as men fear mirrors in the morning.
For you made plain the small deceits
that live like soot in the hinge of habit:
the quick, sweet lie; the lazy mercy withheld;
the secret pleasure of being right.
My will, that proud stallion, stamped and flared.

And somewhere in the hush, behind the eyelids,
a phrase rose like incense from a hidden brazier:
thelema—the burning word for will—
and with it, softer than steel yet harder than stone,
the law that is not licence but a yoke of stars:
Love is the law, love under will.
The brighter the lamp, the clearer the dust.

IV

Then the work began—
not in the hands, but in the inward grain of me.
I had thought myself a temple already,
finished, worthy, roofed in gold.
But you showed me roughness—
not monstrous, not dramatic—
only the ordinary jutting edges of the self,
the places where pride catches cloth and tears it.

So I struck at what was needless—
not with fury, but with rhythm:
a small, steady knocking in the dark,
as if some quiet gavel in my marrow
refused the luxury of despair.
Each blow sent up a little cloud—
motes turning like planets in your beam—
and I learned this strange arithmetic:
what falls away is often what I loved most.

You were an alchemist’s fire, O light:
in your heat the leaden habits softened,
the dull old weights began to run like metal,
blackened first, then paling—
as if the soul must pass through soot and salt
before it can bear the blush of gold.
And still the air was full of drifting witness.
The brighter the lamp, the clearer the dust.

V

I had imagined mystery as theatre—
a robe, a word, a sudden blaze;
but mystery is also the discipline of the unseen.
It is the hand that smooths what anger cracked,
the careful laying of mercy between living stones,
the trowel of the heart moving in silence
to bind what would fall apart.

So I began to carry you outward—
not as a lantern held high for praise,
but as a hidden flame kept from the wind.
I let you level my gaze
until I could meet the stranger without hunger
for superiority or reward.
I learned to bow to grey hair
as one bows to snowfall—
not because it is weak,
but because it has endured.

I kept a white cloth at the waist of thought—
not a badge, but a reminder:
keep clean hands, keep humble hands,
even when the world is mud.
And a beehive woke beneath my ribs,
a humming industry of care,
where each small sweetness was made from labour,
not from talk.

When widows stood at the edge of winter,
I tried to be a door that did not slam.
When the orphaned heart shivered in the street of the spirit,
I tried to be bread without questions.
When the helpless were hunted by the loud,
I tried to be a shield made of quiet.
When the oppressed bent like grass beneath boots,
I tried to be the hand that lifts—
not to boast of strength, but to restore the spine.
When the downcast spoke in broken syllables,
I tried to be listening, not instruction.
When the rejected wore their shame like a torn coat,
I tried to stitch dignity back into the seam.

And where the common road is held by law—
that hard, necessary iron that keeps the cart from chaos—
I did not spit upon it for the sake of pride;
I honoured the order that lets the weak sleep.
Yet I remembered: obedience without morality
is only a well-swept cage.
So I kept you burning:
a private tribunal of conscience,
a lamp that judges without hatred.
The brighter the lamp, the clearer the dust.

VI

And you asked of me knowledge—
not the cold hoard of clever men,
but the common stock of understanding,
the shared loaf of meaning broken for the many.
So I opened the book where my heart had been closed,
and let its pages breathe upon my eyes
like a night wind off a river.

I set one candle more in the library of the world.
I spoke a word that loosened another’s fear.
I learned a thing and gave it,
as bees give honey—
not because they are praised,
but because abundance is their nature.
I honoured the bonds of friendship
as one honours a bridge in flood—
by walking it faithfully, by not testing it for sport.

And sometimes—
when the ritual hush came down like snowfall
and the air seemed thick with older names,
when gestures felt like keys turning
in locks I could not see—
I sensed each soul as a star kept under cloth,
each life a point of fire sworn to its own orbit;
and I understood the terrible tenderness of it:
not all stars are kind,
yet all are meant to burn true.

So you made a temple of me, O light—
not a temple of marble,
but of measured hours and reined desire,
of mercy laid carefully like mortar,
of truth squared to the tongue,
of love made obedient to will.
And because you built, you also exposed—
for temples gather dust as surely as cottages do.
The brighter the lamp, the clearer the dust.

VII

Now I do not ask you to flatter me.
I do not ask you to be soft.
I ask only that you remain—
that you keep your steady, intimate gaze
upon the checkered floor of my days,
upon the twin pillars of my breath,
upon the door of my choosing.

Let your eye be in the flame,
not to terrify, but to teach me
what it means to be seen and not be ashamed.
Let your circle close around my appetite
until my wildness becomes music,
until my “want” becomes “ought,”
until the lead in me remembers gold.

And when I fall—
for dust is faithful, and returns—
give me the humble courage to sweep again,
to strike again, to measure again;
to lift the bowed, to shelter the storm-tossed,
to defend what is pure when purity is mocked,
to hold the old in honour,
to keep the friend,
to steady the trembling,
to raise the crushed,
to comfort the dimming,
to restore the outcast’s face to itself,
to respect the law that guards the small,
to promote the quiet goodness that outlasts noise,
to add my handful of light to the world’s great need.

For this is the true enchantment—
not a word spoken once,
but a life spoken daily,
a vow renewed in ordinary rooms,
a green sprig in ash, a promise in winter:
The brighter the lamp, the clearer the dust—
so I sweep on, and let the lamp be judge.

-- Jeffrey Phillips Freeman

A poem I wrote about Freemasonry.

Where mists of silver robe the pilgrim road,
I found a door within the night that sings;
Its lintel carved, an omen of abode,
And laughter rose as if on unseen wings;
There beat a hearth whose coals like roses glowed,
And reined-in Time bowed low and rest bestowed.

The boards swung wide, a whisper: enter, wait,
And candles flamed to music of desire;
A gargoyle spout breathed alchemy of late—
Soft smoke curled up as if from Cupid’s lyre;
Transmuted tears to gold within the fire,
And named me brave who dared the inward choir.

Above the bar, the thoughtful goddess’ brow,
The arctic curtains trembled into glow;
Stern Pallas watched, as if she would avow,
While ravens, warned by wisdom, would not show;
My heart, once winter-locked, regained its throne,
And ruled the hush with warmth it called its own.

I ate from plates that seemed of morning’s glass,
And drank a night that tasted bright as prayer;
The throng, unyoked of debt, let all things pass,
While pixies salted joy into the air;
With manna-clear and amber, feast increased,
Till hunger knelt, delighted and released.

The clocks unhooked their hands from mortal walls,
And set the hours adrift like lanterned seeds;
Untraveled ways grew green through open halls,
And truth came dressed in simple pilgrim’s weeds;
I learned the tender grammar of our needs,
And wrote my soul in what the silence reads.

I have kept watch beneath the moon’s command,
A cavalier whose plume is ash and rain;
I courted storms and kissed the tempest’s hand,
And every wound returned to me as grain;
For love’s deep field is fenced with living reeds,
And peace climbs out where faithful labor bleeds.

If you, dear wanderer, have known this ache,
The candle’s hush that wraps the heart in balm;
If moonlit doors within your dreaming wake,
And all your scattered breath returns to calm;
Draw nearer, friend; let silence tune the lyre,
And lean with me into the waiting fire.

For ink is mercury that seeks the star,
And words are leaves that set the soul to gleam;
I write; the line writes back; we are not far
From arches where the elder heavens dream;
The moon and sun, by odal’s braided sign,
Make twinned horizons answer: thine and mine.

Now take my hand; the tavern walls take wing,
The pages lift; the ink turns auroral;
We step inside the stanza’s living spring,
And feel our pulse become the poem’s choral;
Until no I remains, no you apart—
We are the road, the door, the wine, the heart.

So let the rune within our breaths ignite,
Let every star accord its ancient part;
What once was text now opens into light,
And gilds our joined horizon, heart to heart;
The spell completes: your name and mine unite,
And time bows down to bless our single rite.

-- Jeffrey Phillips Freeman

Now that I have gotten better at writing poetry I wanted to try to re-write one of my old poems and keep the same story but otherwise rewrite it. This is effectively a rewrite of the following poem: The Mage's Tavern.

O Star, dear Star, lean silence on my breast,
While all the wine-dark heav’ns do hold their breath;
The jasmine sighs; warm earth doth sink to rest,
And moths, like prayers, beat softly after death;
One piercing Star doth seam the night’s thin veil,
And there my guarded silence waxeth frail.

I speak to thee as sailors do to fire,
Low-voic’d, lest wind should steal the holy word;
Thou art my North, my hunger, my desire,
The salt of blood, my psalmèd singing bird;
Star, pierce me through, till day hath stripp’d the night,
And bind my broken dark, and make it light.

-- Jeffrey Phillips Freeman

A short format poem I am playing with, again for Star.

I

I have been longer than hunger on the sea—
longer than thirst, longer than the salt’s slow sermon
that polishes a man to bone and keeps polishing.

The sky unbuttons nothing for me.
The sun is a coin I cannot spend.
The moon is a white bruise on the water’s shoulder.
My tongue is a dry oar.
My ribs are a broken ladder to no deck.

Yet still my hands remember—
not bread, not water—
but the warmth of a name I do not dare to speak
except as light.

Star—
not a woman, not a word,
but a pinprick that makes the whole veil bleed.

And when I say it, the dark tastes less like iron.

II

There are nights the ocean turns its face to glass,
and the constellations lie there, doubled—
a choir of distant fires practicing silence.

Then my body, which should have ended,
goes on, as if fed by the mere idea of milk,
as if I have learned a new kind of drinking:

I sip the seams between clouds.
I swallow the small shocks of lightning.
I ration a syllable—
morning, noon, and the blue hour—
three times, with whatever water the world will lend.

There are sailors who live on rats and rope.
I live on radiance and recurrence,
on the strange sensation of returning
to a room I have never entered,

as if I had walked that corridor before—
as if the universe, laughing into its sleeve,
has spun the same thread twice
to see if it will sing.

III

O Star, you are not mercy;
you are gravity disguised as tenderness.

You lean, and my blood remembers its orbit.
You brighten, and the sea—
that old animal that would rather devour than guide—
becomes suddenly obedient,
as if you have spoken its true name.

Sometimes I hear you without hearing:
a voice not loud, not pleading,
a low instrument in the chest of night
that turns even plain speech
into a slow striptease of meaning—

as though the alphabet, undressing,
shows its bare, clean bones and trembles.

I have listened to winds all my life—
trade winds, knife winds, the hot exhale of storms—
but you read the weather like scripture,
and my ruin kneels.

IV

I was lost so long that loss became my country.
I grew used to its flag:
a rag of cloud, a torn horizon.

And then, in fog—
thick as wool, sweet as breath on glass—
I climbed a swell that felt like a mountain,
the sea lifting me toward something unseen.

Below: the black carriage of water humming.
Above: the ceiling of mist, low as a whisper.
Ahead: a door with no house around it—
a seam in the world, a private hinge.

In my palm, a small key of chance,
a token warmed by fingers I had not yet touched,
and the ocean, feigning indifference,
held its breath.

You must understand:
some harbors pretend to be harbors.
Some rooms pretend they are not bedrooms.
Some thresholds joke
to keep from burning.

V

Inside, the air changed its religion.

A hush—
not emptiness, but the charged quiet
that comes before a tide decides to rise.

There was a galley of ordinary things—
metal, wood, the clean smell of cups—
and all of it seemed newly invented
because you were somewhere in the dark of it,
because you were somewhere
in the way light leaned on edges.

Two berths waited, innocent as pages,
and the sea in me laughed—
a laugh that broke into a sigh—
because I knew, without knowing how,
that paper can become fire
and still remain a letter.

O Star, the first time you came near
the room grew another atmosphere.
My skin, that weathered map,
found its missing continent.

Not with speech, not with explanation,
but with the simple grammar of closeness:
a step, a pause,
the whole body becoming a yes
without any trumpets.

VI

Then the ocean remembered it was an ocean.

It rose in me, not as violence,
but as a great old music
that has always wanted a mouth.

Wave after wave—
not counted, only lived—
a repetition so holy it seemed impossible
that any god could be elsewhere.

The sheets became coastlines.
The air became rainlight.
The moon, jealous, pressed itself
against the window and whitened.

I felt the world’s great wheel turn—
that wheeling Yeats spoke of in dreams,
that turning of desire and destiny—
and in the turning there was you:

a star not distant, not cold,
but near enough to scorch,
near enough to make the blood sing
in its own dark throat.

Your brightness did not strike—
it entered.
It found the hidden locks in me
and turned them
as if it had always owned the keys.

And the sea—O the sea—
kept arriving, kept arriving,
until the room itself seemed to float,
until even the bedframes wanted to travel,
until the night, drenched in its own astonishment,
had to open a second chamber of silence
to hold all that overflowed.

Not shame.
Not spectacle.
Only the world’s old flood
finding its level in two bodies
that refused to lie.

VII

After, the storm laid down its arms.

What remained was the tender wreckage:
salt on the lips,
the slow trembling of ropes uncoiling,
the hush where a heartbeat
sounds like a distant drum.

You, star-shaped in the dark,
nested against my chest
as if it were a small safe harbor
you had not been offered before.

And I—
who have been a man of hard seas,
who have pretended to be iron—
became simply a house with the lights on,
a door that would not shut.

Somewhere in the kitchen glow,
a black sweetness—bottled night—
was lifted like a small promise.
Food arrived like a warm dispatch
from the continent of tomorrow.

I learned a new truth:
provisioning is a kind of prayer.
To make someone safer
is to kiss them without touching.

I would never regret
what steadies you.
I would never regret
what makes you smile and live.

The sea can teach a man
many ways to hold on,
but it never taught me this—
how tenderness can be an anchor
let down without noise,
and the deep keeps faith.

VIII

Morning came as a pale witness.

The light found every mark the night had written—
not to accuse,
but to read aloud what had been agreed upon
in the language of breath.

Your steps, later, were a little ocean-swayed—
as if your body still heard the surf
and answered it with a private stumble,
a smile that would not confess its source.

O Star, I did not say forever
as a law, as a chain.
I said it the way a sailor says shore—
as an instinct older than reason.

There are vows that are not paperwork.
There are rings made of salt and astonishment.
There are marriages that begin
when two solitudes recognize each other
like animals at the same stream.

I have wanted many things in my life.
But wanting you felt different—
like recognizing my own name
in a foreign tongue,
and answering without thinking.

IX

And yet—
for all this brightness—
I still drifted.

The sea does not release its captives easily.
Days returned, featureless as coins rubbed smooth,
and my throat forgot the taste of water again.

I came near the edge.

There is a place beyond endurance
where a man begins to barter with nothing—
where even hope feels like a story
told to children to make them sleep.

The sky sealed itself.
The clouds stitched their gray quilts tight.
No star. No sign.
Only the long, animal breathing of waves
and my own breathing, thin as thread.

I began to loosen my grip
on the idea of home.

That was the moment—
not before—
when the heavens performed their small heresy:

a crack, no wider than a fingernail,
opened in the cloud’s dense lid,
and through it you appeared—
not the whole sky, not the whole miracle,
but enough.

Enough to tilt my face up.
Enough to make the ocean, stunned, grow still.
Enough to place a needle of direction
through the vast cloth of night.

Star—
my stubborn, guiding wound—
you did not shout.

You simply shone
as if shining were fidelity.

X

So I followed.

Not as a hero,
not as a man redeemed,
but as a living thing
who has been shown where the water ends.

I followed the small discipline of your light,
the way it corrected my wandering
without humiliating it.

I followed until the sea’s black mouth
lost its appetite for me.

I followed until the horizon
softened into the color of fruit,
until birds appeared—
sudden thrown handkerchiefs of joy—
until land rose like a memory
kept safe under the tongue.

And even then,
even with home in my hands,
I knew the truth was simpler than salvation:

I had survived without food, without water,
because something in you
had taught me how.

Not by promising.
Not by explaining.
But by making the darkness intimate—
by turning night into a room
where a lost man could be held
long enough
to remember he was worth returning.

Star—
if you ever hide again behind cloud,
I will not curse the weather.

I have learned your secret:
even a little light, given truly,
can feed a sailor
until the world comes back.

-- Jeffrey Phillips Freeman

A poem about meeting Star, for when words cant do it justice.

I had been winter for ten years,
a house without lamps,
a field with the wind walking in it and nothing else,
my ribs a gate that refused to open.

Then the city rose—brick and stoop and late siren—
and you stepped out of the streetlight
as if the light remembered you before I did,
as if my name were a door and you knew the hinge.

We had only a day between us, a short cup of noon,
and still the evening took off its coat.
We undressed the hour,
not for hunger, not to conquer any country of the body,
but to lay down borders and breathe across them.
Skin took the oath skin knows:
to be warm, to be a roof, to be a yes without a promise.

You were small-boned—sparrow-light, precise as a fern—
yet average in height,
standing exactly at the measure where the world meets itself.
Your face: a soft square of dawn in a window I had boarded.
Your eyes: two wells where the train of the city stopped to listen.
Your smile: not the sun, no,
the hush under the sun where the lemon tree whispers to itself.
I had seen bodies; I had not seen yours,
and seeing yours was like finding the word my mouth forgot.
You were, truth be told,
how my dreaming hands would have shaped a companion from air and patience—
not to seize, but to hold as a cup holds water without breaking it.

We lay on a mattress as modest as a prayer,
North Philadelphia breathing through the thin walls—
a radio in another apartment, a child laughing twice,
the El murmuring blue iron in the distance.
We kissed as if tasting a fruit you must not bruise,
slow, because something in us had survived by going slowly.
You told me about your father—how the year had learned to say his absence—
and I felt the room tilt to make space for your grief.
Let me be the chair that does not wobble under your weight, I thought.
Let me be the lamp that waits on your table
through the bad weather of a single night.

You liked the way my hands learned your map,
not to explore for gold,
but to be the river that says, I will keep you asleep.
You told me this, and we smiled the softest kind of fierce.
We fell, mid-sentence, into the grammar of breathing,
two commas in one long line,
your palm finding mine and locking there—
and for the first time in a decade
my heart stopped dragging its iron behind it.
Sleep came like mercy with its thousand small wings.
No conquest, no storm; just the clearest lake.
When morning arrived, a weight I had mistaken for my body
was not my body.
When I stood, I stood differently,
as if somebody had opened a window in my blood.

Because of you, the bed remembered it was a shoreline.
Because of you, my breath learned a new season.
Because of you, I was not the beggar of touch but its careful steward,
and the hunger that had sharpened me like a knife
became the knife laid down.

Listen, beloved friend—
we are not a couple threaded by vows or calendars;
we are the bright, unscheduled harbor,
a clear place between storms.
I wish I could lie beside you every night,
learn again the chapel of your shoulder,
count with my cheek the small arithmetic of your ribs,
but wishing is a bird and our evenings are a sky with only some branches.
I know what we are and bow to it.
I won’t confuse the gift with a possession,
won’t chain a bell to a tree and call it home.

Still, you are the most beautiful person my hands have ever translated:
not only the fine geometry of your body,
but the candid architecture of your face,
those eyes that hold the city without flinching,
that smile earnest as a glass of water.
Your beauty is not a picture; it is an event.
It happens to me.
It happens still, now, in the quiet after you leave—
how happiness does not starve me but feeds me,
how remembrance is not a thorn but a warm coin in my pocket.
One night, and I am richer than the years that hoarded me.

To the father absence laid at your door,
I bring bread and time.
I bring the ordinary devotions:
answering when you call,
arriving when your voice has edges,
sitting without language when language is a curtain.
To the city that holds you, I make this vow:
on Broad Street or under the El, in the pharmacy light at midnight,
I will be a shoulder you can borrow,
a small and durable kindness.
I will tend you without asking the world to rename us.

And to the women I will meet after you—
the women my future, once barren, might now be worthy of—
I carry what your body taught my hands:
be a place, not a project;
be a warmth, not a wager;
touch like a person who has seen winter end.
I will bring them the patience our night put on my wrists like bracelets,
the way we refused the easy burn for the steadier fire.
I will bring them the silence we shared that was not an absence,
but the audience of two hearts listening to the same drum.
If I am kinder, it is because you were a door.
If I am steadier, it is because your small sleeping weight
balanced the old tremor inside me.
This is how a single unclasped hour
teaches a decade to forgive itself.

I speak to you now as the daylight climbs rowhouse bricks,
as North Philadelphia shakes off its night birds.
Your name moves through me like a clean instrument;
the city sounds are softer for it.
I do not need to own what I adore.
I need to be worthy of its echo.
So take from me this promise,
light as a coat around your shoulders:
I will meet your sorrow with my unarmed time;
I will keep, in the shoebox of my chest,
the photograph of your smile that the dark itself developed;
and when I touch another face,
I will remember how your eyes asked for gentleness
and were answered.

If there is a prayer that does not ask for more,
it is the one I learned lying beside you—
hands woven, breath braided, the city making lullabies of steel.
It says: let this be enough, let this be seed.
Let the man who had no harbor
build one in his ribs and keep it lit.

And if we never sleep again in that hinge of shared warmth,
know that the room we made continues—
a small, incantatory chamber I carry into every hallway of my life,
where I whisper your name once,
and the world, faithful as a pulse,
answers by opening.

-- Jeffrey Phillips Freeman

Sometimes only a poem can describe how I feel, this is one of those times.