Selected Poems from my quarrel with myself: Testament of a mystic*
by Shirley Thérèse Lewis, edited with an Introduction by Paul Hourihan.

We would like to share with you some of the poetry of Shirley Thérèse Lewis, an early student and close friend of Dr. Paul Hourihan.

The following poems are from a posthumous collection of the poetry of Shirley Thérèse Lewis, whose work reveals the original talent of a born poet. She did not discover her calling until she was forty and alas, had but a few years to harness her vision of life before cancer struck her down. Her poems show the development of a mystic mind, which through meditative practice and inward discipline, achieved deep reserves of spirituality that combated the destructive disease, leaving her, in the process, purified and transformed.

Meditation I

Immersed in liquid light,
All things around are changed,
As souls to joyous flight
To a world of brightness range.

From this drab matrix souls ascend,
Space centreless and sere,
To shining regions drenched in light,
Bathe in effulgence there.

And anchored in that focal point―
Light's centre seizing being's sight―
Souls change from dim to luminous,
Forever freed from dull world's night.

From her journal of December 20th, 1976:
The Winter Solstice.... After a disturbing and anger-filled four days, peace descends. At 10 pm I sit for meditation. Immediately upon sitting, the sensation (but this is not a good word) is one of an enveloping light. The light is outside of me. It comes closer and encompasses me, and I become the light itself. The experience is one of utter and complete ecstasy, as all notion of the small 'self' is lost, totally obliterated in this pulsing, throbbing joy.
 

Meditation XII

Men fence their minds and properties With frames of bonied thought,
But even bones crumble to dust―
An earth is dearly bought―
And what we once thought really so,
Truly worth the expense,
Turns out to be mind's robbery,
Soul circumferenced.
 

Passing Through

If we could just survive this night,
This night of time that for a space
So seems to conquer all,
And gathering up our tattered grace,
Resume the watch, attend the call,
Until the new dawn's light;
If we could just withstand these blasts,
These lashings of intemperate chance
That knock us down, the blow outlast,
Blot out the cosmic dance,
Then we would wake to endless Day
In a new world as yet undreamed,
And there without a cloud in view
Know that this time now merely seemed.
 

    ?
 

To look at life and death with equal eyes,
View neither chagrined nor surprised,
And neither love nor yet despise,
Is nearing serendipity
And the real gold in this fool's valley.
 

    ?
 

Last night I walked in fields of bliss,
The azure rolled away,
And dreamer saw beyond the dream
In vast of endless Day,
No curtain screened the Ultima
And time diminished was,
And thoughts were acts benevolent
As eyes stripped off their haze―
And as I walked, I marvelled,
For all had 'come to pass'―
Foretold by One in ancient fields―
No dream has yet surpassed.
 

    ?

A brighter light invested her,
It turned the room to stone,
And in her aftermath of glow,
A phoenix burned alone.

 

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