NURSING HIS WOUND

 
In Brabazon's case, not only is Meher Baba the Beloved who is the divine wounder, he is also the divine comforter who alone can apply the appropriate balm. The image of bitter-sweet wound of love is, of course, one which has been used universally....

This same terrible condition of being "wounded" in the heart and the psychological state that this wounding engenders is also powerfully and vividly captured by Brabazon, as in the following verses from "The Love Song of John Kerry":

Nursing his wound never healing, but widening
because the spearhead remained in it — widening and love-festering,
sloughing off veil-flesh; widening cleanly and the spearhead of bliss
entering more deeply into the flesh-veils ever more hungrily and healingly,
as the sun into the earth when the farmer sets his plough
more deeply into the sour subsoil where no sun has been before:

Each day of day-drag or day-flight curtained
within the three curtains of sleep-veil and dream-veil and awake-veil —
sleep the forgetter and dream the distortioner and wakefulness
the cruel concretizer who sets the dreams in solid forms, the painter
whose brush strokes are the bones, and whose colour
is the teeming flesh squeezed out of tubes of nerves:

Nursing the wound nursing the wound, gazing with admiration
on the face of the lovely Spearman, he was saying to himself:
Small wonder and great wonder things are as they are
and this business of Everything and Nothing. This business
of being nothing and somebody, nobody feeling he is something. —
Something, something in your hand, Baba, or else nothing before your feet.