HE
THAT HATH the love of the Lamb
Who
draws this parable
In
parable he issues forth,
St.
John the Divine speaking,
Ideal
his melody of silence sings,
Ideal
the gateway of the Lord.
Gentle
John of Patmos ancient,
Blessed
aid in quiet waiting,
He knows a language of creation
Of
the rhythmics of the Lamb.
Here
is a door opened and a key
To the miracle of tongues,
A
long forgotten wisdom
Once
a searchlight of the soul,
So
in signs and wonders,
John
shows the way.
IN
JOHN’S
great Revelation
Is
a revelation sealed in cipher,
Cipher
is mystery,
The
image is mystery
And
on the pallid cipher hangs the mind
To
clothe in words a demon
Written
of the signs.
It is high time in humility
To
think with relation
To
thy words, John,
Foretelling
this darkness
Which
besets the Master.
PARTICULARLY STAND
At
revelation’s
hour,
A
Book and a code of bitter taste
And
the precept of a golden rule,
The
Book of a divine solicitude
Written
of the signs.
Searching the heart, this Book
Must
needs be rhythmic
Relating
things to action
Concordant
with a sky.
Presently this Book,
Personalized
in the wind,
Waits
upon motion
And
alphabetical relativity.
HE THAT IS the event of it,
He
binds with the bonds of it,
Substance
and a blessed form,
To
presuppose it
And
put it to test
And
use it in the parable of the Babe.
And as ye watch and pray
As
if while yet ye may
By
God’s
grace avert night,
Charged
with fresh power,
A
cause illuminates the Book,
A
mean reconciling faith with science.
MY BELOVED SON is right
Saith
the Spirit of Light,
Uttermost
right,
Than
Eden’s
time, light, force amplified
Since
Him there is none other
Named
our Lord and Savior.
WHEN THE QUESTION is
Which
is fact and which is fancy
Or
when fact and fancy disagree,
Beware
the voice of fact
Speaking
more than he knows.
What images the mind rejects
A
mystic word affirms.
Fancy runs in verse
Counting
the word elect
And
spins it out a cipher.
What parable brings to mind
The
fatal code devours
And
spins it out a cipher
In
the harmony of spheres.
THE SYMBOLS write
Impromptu,
and the emblems
Comprehensive
past belief, echo
A
voice ye wot not of.
So being, the solar tongue
Spins
out the parallel
And
tersely tells the man
His
prospering way.
WHEN THE PRINCE of Darkness,
In
a sky of arc and sine and chord,
Overturns
earth
At
her point of zero,
Right
angles from the meridian and back,
A
B C and 1 2 3 make parallel straight lines;
The
Prince of the tempest
And
the chaos of the tempest
To
rhythmic balance tuned.
WE ARE A JOB walking in darkness
While
we do walk beside Satan
Drunk
with his power,
Babel
reiterates the past.
Counting the paradise lost
Thou
seest the beast,
The
creature of an evil mark
Coming
a thousand years
In
decadence to desecrate the earth.
The dragon is a hunter of men,
The
black angel of destruction
Encompasses
the great earth
In
the apocalypse of war.
HELL SHAKES the earth today
With
repercussion;
From
the voice of thunder
Caesar
makes hideous the night
Lucifer
tilts the skies.
Apollyon is put aside
And
he grieves in the abyss
Sunk
where his love is.
“ In
the Hebrew tongue Abaddon,
Apollyon
turns again.”
IN THE PRINCE of the Lemming people
Vengeance
takes his turn.
The
Prince of the tempest,
The
Prince, epitome of evils,
A
counterfeit of Jesus,
Minted
in coin of dross, abominable,
Contemporary
now,
Vies
against the world.
In his fatal footprints
“As
breath to each other,”
Says
a scripture,
The
second beast follows.
WICKED IN THE ARENA of the sky
In
the eye of Taurus,
Thou
seest a beast
Kindling
the great red star.
A demon the same of a different name,
A
name and a killer with a sword
Shake
men’s
foundations.
For it is the iron messiah
The
enigma of authority,
Master
for a little while,
And the bear that walks as a man,
And
the red star of the dragon
Of
the dance of destruction,
Written
of the signs.
HE THAT HATH understanding,
He
sees the die in his own forehead,
The
creature of an evil self.
He sees the great red star
The
scythe of the reaper,
The
horns of the bull.
Bitter to take is death’s
Self-made
divinity of war.
ABIDE THOU READER of the signs!
Blessed
is he who readeth to
Disclose
the false prophet.
Blessed is he that waiteth
By
the faith in the vision
To
amplify the saints;
Thy
vision is Earth.
A part of us we sing,
The
while another weeps.
WHEN SUBVERSIONS
Multiply
power and
Their
course is run
Awhile
unaccountable to God,
In a finger writing in the sand,
A
Babel written on the wall
Like
image patterns in the sand,
He
spells them out to die
And
a pattern in the sand is all.
HE THAT HATH understanding,
After
the earthquake’s menace
While
again the earth trembles,
Let him read by his spirit
So
as before God let him find his ark,
His
spirit ark of saving,
In
the still, small voice in man.
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These verses were complied by Helen M. White two years before
Francis Okie’s death in 1975. The poet’s grandchildren
- Martha Elizabeth Okie, Jesse Shuman Okie, and Susan Rogers
Okie Bush - published them in a short booklet in July 1990
to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the marriage of
their
parents, Richardson B. Okie and Susan Mary Shuman Okie, and
also in memory of their late brother Francis Gurney Okie
III.
Helen White wrote: “ Francis G. Okie’s poems
are written in cipher, in a language of numbers, a “solar
tongue,” a “universal
mathematic.” Ninety-three-year-old Okie, the inventor
of wet and dry sandpaper that provided the key to success
for a
modern, world-wide corporation, retired in middle age,
and for more than thirty years has searched for a core
of meaning
in
the Bible. The mystical poems here presented have been
selected from thousands of lines he created during his
quest.”
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On My Father’s Lines
by Richardson B. Okie
I shall try to convey my father’s way of looking at these
lines which he calls his homework, and how he happened
to begin writing them.
It became apparent during he 1930s, with the rise of
Adolph Hitler and his hateful philosophies of force and race,
that something
akin to a personification of evil was loosed upon the
world. Mankind had best look to itself. Reading the
Revelation
of John, and long interested in biblical writings and
commentary,
my father
realized that St. John, writing in his latter days
of the conflict
of good and evil, gave warning of personified evil
operating in his time. He uttered an eloquent plea for men
to follow
the better way laid open to them in the Gospels. However,
St. John
foresaw future great surges of the evil principle,
and sought to forewarn and arm men against it.
In Revelation, the 13th chapter, verse 18 seemed most
specific:
“Here is wisdom.
He that hath understanding,
Let him count the number of the beast;
For it is the number of a man;
And his number is six hundred and sixty and six.”
The quotation is from the American Standard Edition
(Thomas Nelson & sons,
1901)
When St. John wrote, in the Greek language
of his time, it had long been understood
that the “number” of
a man’s
name was determined by adding the numerical
values of the letters comprising it.
The Greeks used
their alphabet as a numerical
system (since arabic numbers were not
yet invented). Thus alpha was 1, beta
was 2,
gamma, 3, and
so on, but after kappa, 10,
one skipped by tens to the end of the
alphabet. So each name had a number,
determined by
adding up the “count” of
its letters.
In St. John’s time, under the Emperor Nero, the
first official persecution of the Christians began.
Many thought that he, in some combination of his numerous
Latin names, was the “beast” of
Revelations.
A famous example of this same reasoning
occurs in Tolstoi’s
War and Peace, where Pierre and
his friends speculate similarly
in finding
that the
words, “L’empereur
Napoleon” add
up to the count of 666, making
Napoleon another candidate for beasthood.
With Hitler
starting his career
of
conquests, my
father was much impressed by War
and Peace.
St. John, for reasons of danger during the
persecution of the Christians,
had cause to use a numerical
code My father thought,
also, that the use of a language
of numbers gave the message a timelessness
necessary
to take
it down through
the ages.
Gematria is defined by The New
Encyclopaedia Britannica as “the
substitution of numbers for
letters of the Hebrew alphabet,
a favourite
method
of exegesis
used
by medieval Kabbalists
to derive
mystical insights into sacred
writings or obtain new interpretations
of
the texts.” According
to the O.E.D there is no clear
evidence of gematria before
the Philo or Christian writers
of the first century, A.D.
(e.g., Rev. xiii, 18) The “language
of numbers,” however,
was given great weight in the
ancient
world.
The philosopher
Pythagoras,
who gave the world the Pythagorean
Theorem of plane geometry,
had solemnly declared, “all
things are numbers.” Modern
science finds that the different
forms of matter
are different
only
in the numerical relationships
of the positively and negatively
charged ions of which the atomic
elements are
composed.
On a higher level, number and
rhythm are inherent in mankind’s
most deeply felt poetic utterances.
Is there not, then, some
deep relationship as yet
scarcely understood,
between number
and thought? If so, it must
exist also in languages other
than
Hebrew or Greek.
Applying to the English language
the numerical values of
letters as was
customary in Greek,
one gets the
following:
A |
B |
C |
D |
E |
F |
G |
H |
I-J
* |
K |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
L |
M |
N |
O |
P |
Q |
R |
S |
T |
U |
20 |
30 |
40 |
50 |
60 |
70 |
80 |
90 |
100 |
110 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
V |
W |
X |
Y |
Z |
|
|
|
|
|
120 |
130 |
140 |
150 |
160 |
|
|
|
|
|
* Linguistically
J is considered the consonant of I, the two being
basically
the same
letter.
Using these letter-values to
determine the count of the
Revelations line “He
that hath understanding,” one
arrives at the sum
of 869. The introductory
line, “Here
is wisdom,” counts
510. My father uses
this count in the
first introductory
poem
in this
series.
A count can of course
be established
for each of the
lines, but
long reflection
convinced my father
that
the essential
ingredient for
absorbing St. John’s
message, and for
living wisely in the present
and future,
is the “understanding” of
which we all have
need.
He therefore took
as his key the
line, “He
that hath understanding.” And
he set himself
to create lines
having the same
count of 869,
in faith that
the necessary
discipline, selectivity,
and care,
and the rhythms
inherent
in the count,
would lead him to lines having beauty
and significance.
No one need accept
his theory
of the infallibility
of
the
language of
numbers, but it will be
perceived that
the
lines filtered
lovingly through
this medium
are capable of speaking for themselves.
Richardson
B. Okie
March, 1973