Here is a contemplative piece growing out of Mark’s life amid the mounting evils of the early twenty-first century. Knowing the hope and light which continues in dark circumstances, he recites a poem struggling with the conditions but describing his response rising above them.
Download a copy of this poem and illustration HERE.
More poetry at our Poetry Page.
Text of the poem:
Impossible, angry mob
Loyal to old creation
Refuses to grow forward;
Self-made, claiming sovereignty,
Ambitious around the clock
To get it all so you won’t get it,
Then defend it to the death.
Is the will of the growing universe
Thwarted by their choice of extinction?
I choose the will be done,
To stop my soul in silence wait
And contemplate presence to presence,
Like a whale remembering the ocean,
Breathing deep past excess verbiage
And the temptation to rant at them
Who demand old rituals
In so many clamoring voices.
I’m listening without mediation
For impulses in my innermost person
To counsel restoration
Of mind, body, and spirit;
Confessing fear and outrage and weakness
Unequal to the world on fire,
And blunders all wrong just from trying
To make the new creation happen
Before I die.
I have heard that Grace annuls without explanation
The deathly choices,
And incarnation inspires the corpse
To express the breath into the new Body Universe.
So, I watch for the way opening,
Stepping in that way beholding
The changes in us becoming
The new merger of Spirit and
All this.
Mark R. Turner, April 1, 2025,
Athens House
Mark composed the music for this film using PreSonus Notion 6 and Studio One 7, as well as Adobe Audition. The Zoom H4next portable recorder and the Pacific Pro Audio LD-One condenser microphone were used for recording Mark’s voice. He did the original artwork as a digital painting using reference photos in Adobe Photoshop in 2011 and revised it in 2025. He created the motion graphics and assembled the film in Adobe Premier Pro, October 2025.
