47 Faith poems

surrender doesn't mean giving up it means giving over to something bigger than the plan you had i've surrendered many plans what came instead was better every time which is how i know to keep doing it

I want you to know how it was, whether the Cross grinds into dust under men’s wheels or shines brightly as a monument to a new era. There was a church and one man served it, and few worshipped there in the raw light on the hill in winter, moving among the stones fallen about them like the ruins of a culture they were too weak to replace, too poor themselves to do anything but wait for the ending of a life they had not asked for. The priest would come and pull on the hoarse bell nobody heard, and enter that place of darkness, sour with the mould of the years. And the spider would run from the chalice, and the wine lie there for a time, cold and unwanted by all but he, while the candles guttered as the wind picked at the roof. And he would see over that bare meal his face staring at him from the cracked glass of the window, with the lips moving like those of an inhabitant of a world beyond this. And so back to the damp vestry to the book where he would scratch his name and the date he could hardly remember, Sunday by Sunday, while the place sank to its knees and the earth turned from season to season like the wheel of a great foundry to produce you, friend, who will know what happened.

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy! Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel! The bum’s as holy as the seraphim! the madman is holy as you my soul are holy! The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy! Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy Kerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cassady holy the unknown buggered and suffering beggars holy the hideous human angels! Holy my mother in the insane asylum! Holy the cocks of the grandfathers of Kansas! Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuana hipsters peace peyote pipes & drums! Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy the cafeterias filled with the millions! Holy the mysterious rivers of tears under the streets! Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the middleclass! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebellion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles! Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria & Seattle Holy Paris Holy Tangiers Holy Moscow Holy Istanbul! Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the clocks in space holy the fourth dimension holy the fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch! Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the locomotive holy the visions holy the hallucinations holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy the abyss! Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours! bodies! suffering! magnanimity! Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul! Berkeley 1955

I believe that witness is a magnitude of vulnerability. That when I say love what I mean is not a feeling nor promise of a feeling. I believe in attention. My love for you is a monolith of try. The woman I love pays an inordinate amount of attention to large and small objects. She is not described by anything. Because I could not mean anything else, she knows exactly what I mean. Once upon a time a line saw itself clear to its end. I have seen the shape of happiness. (y=mx+b) I am holding it. It is your hand.

In your extended absence, you permit me use of earth, anticipating some return on investment. I must report failure in my assignment, principally regarding the tomato plants. I think I should not be encouraged to grow tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold the heavy rains, the cold nights that come so often here, while other regions get twelve weeks of summer. All this belongs to you: on the other hand, I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly multiplying in the rows. I doubt you have a heart, in our understanding of that term. You who do not discriminate between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence, immune to foreshadowing, you may not know how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf, the red leaves of the maple falling even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible for these vines.

Once I believed in you; I planted a fig tree. Here, in Vermont, country of no summer. It was a test: if the tree lived, it would mean you existed. By this logic, you do not exist. Or you exist exclusively in warmer climates, in fervent Sicily and Mexico and California, where are grown the unimaginable apricot and fragile peach. Perhaps they see your face in Sicily; here we barely see the hem of your garment. I have to discipline myself to share with John and Noah the tomato crop. If there is justice in some other world, those like myself, whom nature forces into lives of abstinence, should get the lion's share of all things, all objects of hunger, greed being praise of you. And no one praises more intensely than I, with more painfully checked desire, or more deserves to sit at your right hand, if it exists, partaking of the perishable, the immortal fig, which does not travel.

Because he was as hard to handle As truth, which we equate with light, Go somewhere dark and hold a candle For Alan Sullivan tonight.

If   I would be walking down the road you told me to imagine and I would and find a diner kind of   teacup sitting on its saucer in the middle then I would feel so good in my life that is just like mine I would walk right up and look into my face eclipsing the sky in the tea in the cup and say, “Thank you, I have enjoyed imagining all this.”

In appreciation of Maxim Gorky at the International Convention of Atheists, 1929 Like Gorky, I sometimes follow my doubts outside to the yard and question the sky, longing to have the fight settled, thinking I can't go on like this, and finally I say all right, it is improbable, all right, there is no God. And then as if I'm focusing a magnifying glass on dry leaves, God blazes up. It's the attention, maybe, to what isn't there that makes the emptiness flare like a forest fire until I have to spend the afternoon dragging the hose to put the smoldering thing out. Even on an ordinary day when a friend calls, tells me they've found melanoma, complains that the hospital is cold, I say God. God, I say as my heart turns inside out. Pick up any language by the scruff of its neck, wipe its face, set it down on the lawn, and I bet it will toddle right into the godfire again, which—though they say it doesn't exist—can send you straight to the burn unit. Oh, we have only so many words to think with. Say God's not fire, say anything, say God's a phone, maybe. You know you didn't order a phone, but there it is. It rings. You don't know who it could be. You don't want to talk, so you pull out the plug. It rings. You smash it with a hammer till it bleeds springs and coils and clobbery metal bits. It rings again. You pick it up and a voice you love whispers hello.

I shall not go with pain Whether you hold me, whether you forget My little loss and my immortal gain. O flower unseen, O fountain sealed apart! Give me one look, one look remembering yet, Sweet heart. I shall not go with grief, Whether you call me, whether you deny The crowning vintage and the golden sheaf. O, April hopes that blossom but to close! Give me one look, one look and so good-bye, Red rose. I shall not go with sighs, But as full-crowned the warrior leaves the fight, Dawn on his shield and death upon his eyes. O, life so bitter-sweet and heaven so far! Give me one look, one look and so good night, My star.