From Poems on Reason

The Light

The Light is radiantly beautiful.

It shines from the farthest star to the nearest thought.

Reality is.

Yet disorder reigns and the evil it brings

Covers the Light.

I think:

What of the cold clear dawn of Reason?

Why is it hidden from those who need it to live?

Those who think,

Those who have seen the Light, however briefly,

Those who realize reality know

Order cannot be defeated or destroyed.

The thoughts of those who think for themselves

Breathe the promise of Light.

This is the Truth.

The Light exists no matter what the blindness

Of some men may tell us.

- James Henderson, Poems on Reason, May, 1976

The Beam

The Mind

“Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness:
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.”

–Andrew Marvell, "The Garden"

“The Brain - is wider than the Sky -
For - put them side by side -
The one the other will contain
With ease - and You - beside..."

–Emily Dickinson, "Life," The Complete Poems

“Some minds seem almost to create themselves, springing up under every disadvantage and working their solitary but irresistible way through a thousand obstacles.”

–Washington Irving, The Sketch Book

The Beam

There are minds and there is Mind.
There is the river of thought
Molded by the sands of time to form the destinies that guide the masses.
A river that shifts as their beliefs and feelings
Flow to the music of the will of the majority.

There is the Beam which shatters through the pretense of those who would
Threaten the few who, rather than believing,
Choose to decide for themselves,
Choose to create their own being,
Choose to use their mind to change the course of the river.

- from Poems on Reason, 1976 (revised 1991)