Rosa Ignea
A July Submission Poem by Sara da Encarnação
Rosa Ignea
Before the dew fell on the first rose,
before the Word broke silence into form,
I was already seeking you…
the other half of a flame that had never yet been lit.
You are the salt in my sulphur,
the mercury running through the sealed vessel.
We are the solve and the coagula,
the dissolution and the fixing,
the prima materia dreaming itself awake.
They speak of the rose upon the cross…
how beauty is nailed to suffering,
how the fragrant and the painful
are not opposites but one single mystery
opening.
You opened me like that.
Not gently.
The way initiation is never gentle…
the way light is violent to eyes that have lived long in the dark.
O Deus meus et omnia…
my God and my everything,
which is another way of saying
you.
The invisible fire does not burn what it truly enters.
It transmutes.
I am not the same substance
I was before you.
The philosophers kept their secret in plain sight:
As above, so below.
As within, so without.
What I feel for you is not smaller than the cosmos.
It has the same structure…
the same terrible symmetry,
the same love that holds the planets from flying apart into silence.
There is a rose that blooms at the center of the cross.
It has no season.
It does not need the sun
because it is the sun…
the interior sun,
the one the Rose and the Cross guarded
behind seven seals and seven silences.
You broke every one.
Not with force…
with the simple fact of existing
in the same world as me.
Fiat Lux.
Let there be light.
And there was.
And it had your face.
And it was good.
And it was not an ending
but a beginning
that has no name yet in any sacred language.
Only this:
the rose still blooming
on the wood of the cross of time.
And the fire…
the invisible fire
moving through all things until the hidden work is finished.
Igne Natura Renovatur Integra.
All of nature renewed by fire.
So are we.
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Read Sara da Encarnação’s original post here to also read a fragment from the Book of the Hidden Fire.
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Thank you for this contribution! It Is veritas. Gratitude.
Sara, this feels like love written not as possession but as alchemy, the meeting of two substances that alter one another simply by coming into contact. I love the way the rose and the cross refuse to remain opposites here: beauty is not spared suffering, nor is suffering allowed to have the final word. There is something in that invisible fire, the recognition that what we call transformation is perhaps only the unveiling of what was already there, waiting beneath the names we gave ourselves. We think another person changes us, when perhaps they simply become the flame by which we finally see what we were.