Poetry has a unique function in the human psyche. It reaches down into the soul of the reader with a loving caress and says, “I see you. I hear your longing and desire, your heartbreak and your sorrow. I am your friend. Let me walk beside you.” In the same tradition as the great devotional poetry of Rumi, Rilke, and Hafiz, Tina Benson’s rich collection of erotic and devotional love poems and writings is such a friend. As you savor each poem let her walk beside you, and may you hear your own soul singing.
FOREWORD
BY ALFRED K. LAMOTTE
(All italics are from the poems by Tina Benson)
As the author of three books of poems, all of them about the path of mystical love, I was drawn to Tina Benson’s work, as she was drawn to mine. We became friends because our hearts irradiated one another, even when we lived far apart in the illusion of material distance. I invite you too to discover your proximity to Tina’s heart, through these poems that burn away what seems to separate our souls.
Many intuitives in this age are re-awakening the Way of the Heart, and poetry is often the vessel that carries this nectar of awakening. Not a new way, this is the path of the Christian mystics, Sufis like Rumi and Hafiz, Medieval troubadours, ecstatic poet saints of India like Mirabai and Lalladev. From diverse cultures and religions, these mystic poets all share a common language, at once sensual and transcendent, to express the inexpressible joys and losses of Love’s work in the human heart.
Erotic language is the only vocabulary for putting this inner fire into words. The Eros of mystical love means weeping as well as joy. It means getting lost in the dark, where we are penetrated by that beam of light that impregnates our soul with a splendor that cannot be likened to anything but the rapture of the nuptial bed.
Tina Benson’s poems invite us to consider the possibility that, within the bridal chamber of our own chest, we can make love to God. This ecstatic union demands a language of transcendental sensuality. Here, as in the greatest mystical poetry, every voluptuous image of earthly love points to an interior rapture for those who are doing soul-work.
I want your fiery breath
on my belly,
your sound in my ears,
your salt in my mouth
Do these words speak of the dance of two bodies in love, or the communion of soul and Spirit through the breath of meditation, the sound of the mantra, the ecstatic taste of the Divine Name?
God is not a theological abstraction in these hymns, but an active lover, more intimate to the psyche than the psyche to herself:
Fertilizing me,
impregnating me
with your breath!
As every meditator knows, the mystery of union can be realized through the most primal human act: breathing. What could be more physical, more immediate? Simple respiration becomes a silent prayer, and in the purest communion, we receive our very inhalation as the gift of the Beloved. So this poet cries for us all:
I want your fiery breath!
Tina’s best-selling first book, “A Woman Unto Herself: A Different Kind of Love Story,” was a woman’s discovery that the love she thought would come through a man’s external form, was the ecstasy of her own divinely human Self-radiance. Yet the journey to wholeness involved terrible pangs of transformation and purgation. Mystics know well that the way of loss is the only path to fullness.
In this second book, Tina gives us a song cycle that we may read as a number of interlocking poems, or a single hymn of ecstasy. Her song of songs begins with the recognition that:
There is an aching in the human soul
for Holy Communion
with ourselves…
The path from that ache of longing, to the recognition that we ache for our own beloved Self, is a burning path, a nameless way, a wayless pathless surrender. For only the loss of who we are not, acquaints us with who we are.
Tina begins, as do all true mystics, by inviting us to become naked, to strip ourselves of the false identities with whom we masked ourselves, because we sought love in the wrong places. Her poem cries:
Undress yourself.
Stand unveiled.
There is no other way to touch God.
Tina invites you even to leave your name outside. The soul who abandons herself for love’s sake may even feel at times that she is losing her mind:
Where is the asylum
For lovers gone mad
With the intoxication of Love?
Yet in the end, it is a blessing to lose this mind! Why should the lover not want to lose a mind so full of doubt and fear, chattering with the past and future, when the Beloved is pure Presence?!
Yes, only through loss can we find, in Tina’s words: the unfathomable love that one Is. Self-loss is a purification that cleanses the heart and prepares the marriage bed. This song-cycle takes the reader through the entire spiritual path: from purification to ecstasy, from apophatic mysticism (emptiness without images) to cataphatic mysticism (fullness of the divine Beloved).
In the end, these poems offer triumph – triumph that is inward and quiet, yet more solid and lasting than any external reward; the triumph of brave lovers who burn away the darkness through the power of Self-luminosity. Tina Benson’s poems reveal that in love, we find eternal light: We are ablaze in our own incomprehensible beauty.
~Alfred K. LaMotte
Alfred K. LaMotte is the author of two books of poems published by Saint Julian Press:
Wounded Bud: Poems for Meditation, and Savor Eternity One Moment At A Time.
He is co-author of an art book, Shimmering Birthless: A Confluence of Verse and Image, published by artist Rashani Réa.
LaMotte is a college instructor in Philosophy and World Religions, and an interfaith chaplain.