Richard Shaw |Post election

Poem

Our personalities reflect, Our deepening experience as an individual

Our destiny provides us, With the experiences to fashion that

But if we are most true to ourselves, We can find ourselves isolated

Our need for connection, Our need for the truth

Within and beyond ourselves, Obliges us to reach out

And in reaching out, To hold back

Enough for the truth itself to be revealed, Beyond our own persuasions

And to discover the other, More fully as they are

And to discover ourselves, More fully as we are

And in this discovery of self and other,

To discover what the situation needs

As something between self and other

Where the two becomes a three

In an act of intimate alchemy

Hence new life is born new life, And new ideas

Ideas for change that come from within, Are not imposed from without

Ideas that grow within consensus, To become ideals

As practical as they are rarefied, And which repeat Mahatma’s words:

‘Be the change you would see in the world’