This poem draws heavily on a poem by T.S. Eliot called Gerontion. It is about a fallen and dreaming humanity, a present age of decrepitude and impotence, a spiritually deceased world on its way to extinction. My poem links Eliot and some aspects of the new forces of this newly emerging religion, the Baha’i Faith, together.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 11 October 1998.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
-W.B. Yeats

The reality of sacrifice is that there is no sacrifice.
-’Abdu’l-Baha

These poems are spun around moments
in centres and circles, the fruit of a life-
time of breathings, seeings and hearings.
Here I am, a man in the evening of his life,
in an Antipodean town near the ocean,
listening to Bach and my printer buzz.

I was not at Tabarsi, nor did my blood
drop anywhere in Persia, then, or now.
My wife helps out in the neighbourhood
and my son finishes his service in Haifa.
I will go for a walk in a few minutes.
I will also give this poem a pithy and
profound coherence in the next lines.

There is no nightmare vision here
or a series of dissconnected parts.
The ressurection has come to pass
and is here in the Kingdom of His signs.(1)
I do not address this poem to the
Gerontians among us for whom those
gems of utterance were not intended(2)
and who would not respond then, or now.

(1) Baha’u'llah, Epistle to the Son of the Wolf, p.131.
(2) T.S. Eliot has a poem called Gerontion which he wrote between May 1917 and May/June 1919. A Gerontion is (i) a little old man(Greek), (ii)a little old dried-up evangelist, (iii) a dull head, (iv) a figure without moral authority, (v) a person who is ‘relaxed and uncommitted’ and wants to keep it that way; and (vi) symbolic of what is empty and dry in our civilization and incapable of responding to ultimate truth and beauty.

-Those ‘gems of utterance’ are the Tablets of the Divine Plan written and first promulgated at the same time the poem Gerontion was written.
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After reading the above passage in The Melbourne Age, online, I wrote the following personal, historical, philosophical and religious prose-poem on the thylacine.-Ron Price, George Town Tasmania
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A PERILOUS EXISTENCE

On 7 September 1936 the world’s last captive thylacine or Tasmanian tiger died in the Hobart Zoo. The thylacine is the only mammal to have become extinct in Tasmania since European settlement. I have spent a significant part of my life in northern Tasmanian, where many sightings of the tiger have occurred since 1936.

When the last Tasmanian tiger died in 1936 my maternal grandfather was about to retire on a Canadian old age pension. His wife would die in three years and my mother was about to meet my father. The Baha’i community, which members of my family have been associated with in Canada now for fifty-five years, was, in September 1936, just beginning to conceive a plan to establish one centre in every state of the USA and in every country in Central and South America with ramifications to include every country on the European continent.(1) By the end of that plan, a seven year plan from 1937 to 1944, my parents had met and married. On 23 July 1944 I was born, three days after an assassination attempt on the life of Hitler and four days before another planned assassination on his life. -Ron Price with thanks to (1) Shoghi Effendi, Messages To America, Wilmette, 1947, p.7.

Indeed, the field was immense,
the task gigantic, the privilege
immeasurably precious, but the
time was short, obligations sacred,
paramount and urgent to muster
all our force, our resources, our
faith, determination and energy
to set out, single-minded and
undaunted, to attain exertion’s
heights—as humanity entered
the outer fringes of the most
perilous stage of its existence
and as the thylacine was in the
last phase of its existence—or
so it seemed until the other day.

Ron Price
20 May 2008