Jane

If We Live Again

If we live again

then I’ll come back

as all your relatives –

mother, father,

sister, brother;

all the elements of my love

dispersing

into their own personhoods

and forming

a family crafted

by love’s center;

yet freely

asking nothing

not even

“Do you remember?” 

By Jane Roberts 

Past Lives (to Rob)

In what past lives

did we live before? 

My cells remember

what my brain does not recall.

Your touch

sends images flying up

like leaves rising in a wind

from silent layers

underground.

They stir, brilliant,

up to the edge of thought

and die; return, go back

to settle in my spine

untouched but sensed,

locked in secret

codes of bone.

Not memories, but whole

enclosed moments burst

and disappear,

found and lost, surely

forever gone,

and yet

your touch calls them up

like bubbles

from the muffled breath

of some submerged fossil

that still buried

is intact, not dead

but only dreaming.

By Jane Roberts

IF WE LIVE AGAIN Or, Public Magic and Private Love

Prentice-Hall; 1982

Cover flap:

“When we write poetry we ask questions of the heart rather than the intellect. It’s as if we somehow know that the real answers slip between our rational thoughts; or even suspect that on occasion our feelings are the answer.”  

Jane Robert’s collection of essays and poetry explores the connections between love, enhanced perception, and unofficial speculations. [..] She lets the “magical reasoning” of the heart examine questions that the intellect alone can’t answer. In particular, she deals with love as an altered state of consciousness and considers the sometimes embarrassing questions that love asks of religion and science alike – questions that lead to what she calls “the magical approach” to love and life itself.

She explores personal love whether the love object is a person, a cause, an idea – or an aspect of nature, and praises the power of the emotions as they correlate with the ever-moving forces of the seasons. She also stresses the importance of self-love, maintaining that it leads ultimately to a greater sense of unity with nature and existence. Opening pathways to deeper levels of perception, If We Live Again encounters one of love’s greatest questions: “Do we live again? What are the many possible versions of immortality that might preserve our loves – and our lives themselves?

JANE ROBERTS (1929-1984) has published over a dozen volumes of prose and poetry, novels and fictions.