The texts for TRANSFIGURATIONS are built around the idea of change from one state to another. They are drawn from science, mythology, poetry, religion, personal observation, and philosophy. In reflecting on this theme, it became clear that a person’s attachments and sense of control govern their relationship to change. I ran with that idea and chose to center on poems of transformation, from a variety of points of view. 

The PRELUDE is a prayer to fire, that most potent agent of change. I imagined Fire as a divine force and wrote the poem using an ancient prayer structure. All things change, all the time. The PRELUDE asks that divine force of change to turn our belief, away from our fixed illusions of control toward an acceptance of the ubiquity and power of unexpected transformation. 

PHOTON focuses on the transformation that occurs in the heart of a star—energy becoming light, becoming life itself. The conflation of light and love is a common theme in my poetry, and here I imagine that it is Love that ignites in a star’s heart, and Love which turns the light of a star, through photosynthesis, into life itself. I like to think the design of the universe is elegant, and that Love—Divine Love, self-love, love of others—is the reason for, and end result of, all things. 

OZYMANDIAS acts as a prelude to Shelley’s famous sonnet about a traveler encountering the ruin of a colossal statue. I copied Shelley’s form and wrote stanzas which might serve as the lead-in to the famous inscription on the statue’s base, highlighting the folly of considering oneself immune to the transfiguration of time. Even today we have Ozymandiases who posture and preen to embellish their status of the moment, erecting statues (or spaceships or skyscrapers) to their own vainglory without regard to the future or the potential of their legacy to do otherwise. 

IPHIS comes from a story in the Metamorphoses, a series of mythological poems written in the 1st c. BC by the Roman poet Ovid. In this story a girl is masquerading as a boy. She is betrothed by her parents to a girl whom she loves, which will force the revelation of her true identity. Iphis prays to Isis to rescue her from this impossible situation. The goddess transforms her into a boy so that she can fulfill her betrothal vow and have the partner (s)he desires. 

YESHUA centers on the Transfiguration scene in the New Testament (Matthew 17, Mark 9, Luke 9), as Jesus appears to the disciples on the mount utterly transformed, gleaming white, in the presence of Moses and Elijah—standing as it were in the space between the Law and the Prophets, between Heaven and Earth. Would that we could shine so bright, and thus transform the world. 

The final movement, TAT TVAM ASI, takes its title from the Hindu concept “Thou art That”—that you already are the transcendent ultimate reality, the universal cosmic consciousness.  The text of the poem is adapted from Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali (with a little bit of Rumi and C.S. Lewis too). 

In total, the texts of TRANSFIGURATIONS remind us that change is ubiquitous, inevitable, wondrous, and terrible, and that much of our happiness in this life is based on our willingness to be guided by its powerful hand.