Unicorn 13

who does not wish, openly or secretly, to meet it, in some quiet place? even a secret image in the mind's dead index of those materialists who deny it a reality, calling it a ‘mythological creature’ – as if the mind were not superior to flesh and earth? this, the very reason for its longevity – who would not, were it material, have hunted it by now for a prince’s ransom, its magic horn ground down, hunted to extinction – so that we would say ‘as dead as unicorn’ and left the dodo forgotten and unmourned? and so, to be a myth is logical… and thus, the unicorn lives, beyond some banal death at a hunter’s hands; easy, peaceful in its own preserves, grazing in the pure air of our minds, free to remind us that we too are born free. the secrets of creation hide in such unthought hills as paradox – we, yearning for a meeting in a place we know not where where in that still and silent place loud with silent joy, moving in ways beyond the movement seen, we meet it when the looking stops and paradox on paradox, once met, we do not seek to meet and meet again – its tender single glance tells us for ever that it always lived inside ourselves; we ourselves that ‘mythological creature’, more real than our mirrored self, grazing in the wooded groves of stillness, the mossy dells of silence; or, its wild mane wind-tossed, on the flying highest hills of freedom or bright-eyed, salt-browed, white between the spraying waves and curling surf: knowing ourselves to be, forever to have been: unicorn