47 Faith poems

Let me be in your service like the others mumbling predictions, mouth dry with jealousy. Parched tongue thirsting, not even for the word— for me the dry air is empty again without you. I’m not jealous any more but I want you. I carry myself like a victim to the hangman. I will not call you either joy or love. All my own blood is gone. Something strange paces there now. Another moment and I will tell you: it's not joy but torture you give me. I'm drawn to you as to a crime— to your ragged mouth, to the soft bitten cherry. Come back to me, I'm frightened without you. Never had you such power over me as now. Everything I desire appears to me. I'm not jealous any more. I'm calling you.

For I will consider my Star Sol. For I am the servant of this Living God and daily serve her. For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East I worship in my way. For this is done by fixing espresso and watching the pinkening light on The Shard. For then she waves her warmth across the scene and lifts the hearts of those who took a Night Bus at 4 a.m. to clean HQs. For she tickles the orbitals of foxes in their stride and hies them home. For having risen and settled into her groove she begins to consider herself. For this she performs in eleven degrees. For first she does the Planck to strengthen core stability. For secondly she runs a malware scan for comets closing in. For thirdly she completes the paperwork for eclipses total, annular, and partial. For fourthly: flares. For fifthly she sorts her sunspots into pairs. For sixthly she gives neutrinos Priority Boarding. For seventhly she referees the arm-wrestling match between the upstart fusion and gravity. For eighthly she weaves flux ropes and thinks up skipping games. For ninthly she degausses her plasma screens. For tenthly she is profligate with her photons. For eleventhly: star jumps. For having considered herself she will consider her neighbors. For she runs a cloth around the ecliptic to make it gleam. For she oils the wheels of any planets gliding there. For she sends invites out to wallflowers in the Oort cloud. For she issues shadows for children to dodge as they make their way to school. For she shakes out her blankets for devotees of helioseismology. For when she takes her prey she plays with it to give it a chance. For one planet in nine escapes by her dallying. For in her morning orisons she loves the Earth and the Earth loves her. For she is of the tribe of Tyger! Tyger! For she hands out coloring books to chameleons in the morning. For when it is time to rise she blushes to be seen at so intimate an hour. For when it is time to set she is crimson ashamed to run out on us. For though she neither rises nor sets she thinks it best that we believe so, so that we can take our rest and fuel our waking with anticipation. For she lifts oceans over mountains without thinking. For she tries to solve the puzzle of the weather, placing this here and that there and attempts to even out the air. For she is a mixture of gravity and waggery. For she’s a stickler for solstices. For she booms like a woofer for those that can hear. For she cares not what lives as long as all live. For she takes her time. For she lenses the light from distant stars to swerve it into our sockets. For sometimes in the winter haze she’s as pale as a lemon drop and lets us watch her bathe unpunished. For she never calls in sick. For her colors are open source. For every raindrop’s an excuse for Mardi Gras. For she will work on her drafts for a million years and release them typo-free. For she will lash out and then regret the hurt. For she promises radio hams jam tomorrow. For your power grid is a cobweb she walks into when she steps off her porch. For she kept mum through the Maunder Minimum. For her behavior is definitely “on the spectrum.” For she keeps dark about dark matter but she definitely knows something. For she plays Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Furnaced. For she offers board and lodging to Turner’s angel in the Sun. For she made a great figure in Egypt for her signal services. For she can fuse the wounded parts of a broken heart and release the lost mass as hope. For she spins plates to create auroras. For she leaves clues all over the place: some cryptic, some quick, some general knowledge-based. For she is hands-off. For she tends to micromanage. For she lays down squares of light for your pets to sleep in. For she turns a blind eye to all the creeping, swooping killers of the night but leaves a Moon-faced night-light on. For her sunquakes flatten no buildings, gridlock no cities, disgorge no refugees. For she is not too proud to dry your smalls. For she gives us heliopause and time to rethink disastrous decisions. For Ray-Bans. For she polarizes opinion. For her secrets are waiting to free us. For she appreciates Stonehenge and visits every day. For she sets herself by the grid of Manhattan. For she will kill you with the loving of you. For she can shine.

Leaves drift from the cemetery oaks onto late grass, Sun-singed, smelling like straw, the insides of old barns. The stone angel's prayer is uninterrupted by the sleeping Vagrant at her feet, the lone squirrel, furtive amid the litter. Someone once said my great-grandmother, on the day she died, rose from her bed where she had lain, paralyzed and mute For two years following a stroke, and dressed herself—the good Sunday dress of black crepe, cotton stockings, sensible, lace-up shoes. I imagine her coiling her long white braid in the silent house, Lying back down on top of the quilt and folding her hands, Satisfied.   I imagine her born-again daughters, brought up In that tent-revival religion, called in from kitchens and fields To stand dismayed by her bed like the sisters of Lazarus, Waiting for her to breathe, to rise again and tell them what to do. Here, no cross escapes the erosion of age, no voice breaks The silence; the only certainty in the crow's flight Or the sun's measured descent is the coming of winter. Even the angel's outstretched arms offer only a formulated Grace, her blind blessings as indiscriminate as acorns, Falling on each of us, the departed and the leaving.

Better trust all, and be deceived, And weep that trust, and that deceiving; Than doubt one heart, that, if believed, Had blessed one’s life with true believing. Oh, in this mocking world, too fast The doubting fiend o’ertakes our youth! Better be cheated to the last, Than lose the blessèd hope of truth.

What are we bound for? What’s the yield Of all this energy and waste? Why do we spend ourselves and build With such an empty haste? Wherefore the bravery we boast? How can we spend one laughing breath When at the end all things are lost In ignorance and death? . . . The stars have found a blazing course In a vast curve that cuts through space; Enough for us to feel that force Swinging us through the days. Enough that we have strength to sing And fight and somehow scorn the grave; That Life’s too bold and bright a thing To question or to save.

It was midday before we noticed it was morning. The boy cousins brought us a tray—soup and cheese, warm soda, and a soft cloth and candy for her fever. They wouldn’t come in, the tray weighing between them. They stood like woodwork inside the door frame. By afternoon the old procession—silence at the lip of a dozen night travelers tired and grieving, one by one, or pairs floating to the bed and back with a touching of hands like humming, and the one we gathered for slipping farther for all the good we could do. She lay in her shadow. She looked to no one. Her daylilies bobbed wide open out in the wild, blue sun and the same bee kept nosing her window to reach them. Dusk: even the boys were back watching it try.

For Ira With the seal of science emblazoned on your forehead, like the old Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, I believe what you tell me about cells and molecules, though I can't see them. And though the language you speak is full of numbers and symbols I'll never understand; though your tie is askew and your hair unruly, still I believe what you say about the size of the universe, which is either expanding or contracting, I've forgotten which already. So if tomorrow you tell me you made a small miscalculation, that God indeed created the world in 6 short days, then rested on the 7th, that it was Eve who landed us in all this trouble, I would believe you. I would believe you as I've always done before.

When I cannot believe, The brown herds still move across green fields Into the tufty hills, and I was born Higher, where I could watch them as a bird might. When even memory seems imagined, what Can I bring to prayer? A pair of knees. The great faith that built a stair to heaven As now my memory tries to climb a hill, Becomes an old stone building, a deaf priest Whose hand is in the pockets of his parish, Who longs to buy a bell he'll never hear. The water in the font is cold, I trace A circle on my brow and not a cross.

Slowly the women file to where he stands Upright in rimless glasses, silver hair, Dark suit, white collar. Stewards tirelessly Persuade them onwards to his voice and hands, Within whose warm spring rain of loving care Each dwells some twenty seconds.Now, dear child, What’s wrong,

Praying answers prayer: in the deep spells of inquiry and hope, a self enabled to rise again to the compromises and the shattering caring forms