47 Faith poems

1. Let us think of God as a lover Who never calls, Whose pleasure in us is aroused In unrepeatable ways, God as a body we cannot Separate from desire, Saying to us, “Your love Is only physical.” Let us think of God as a bronze With green skin Or a plane that draws the eye close To the texture of paint. Let us think of God as life, A bacillus or virus, As death, an igneous rock In a quartz garden. Then, let us think of kissing God with the kisses Of our mouths, of lying with God, As sea worms lie, Snugly petrifying In their coral shirts. Let us think of ourselves As part of God, Neither alive nor dead, But like Alpha, Omega, Glyphs and hieroglyphs, Numbers, data. 2. First forgive the silence That answers prayer, Then forgive the prayer That stains the silence. Excuse the absence That feels like presence, Then excuse the feeling That insists on presence. Pardon the delay Of revelation, Then ask pardon for revealing Your impatience. Forgive God For being only a word, Then ask God to forgive The betrayal of language. 3. God of the Syllable God of the Word God Who Speaks to Us God Who Is Dumb The One God  The Many God the Unnameable God of the Human Face God of the Mask God of the Gene Pool Microbe  Mineral God of the Sparrow’s Fall God of the Spark God of the Act of God Blameless  Jealous God of Surprises And Startling Joy God Who Is Absent God Who Is Present God Who Finds Us In Our Hiding Places God Whom We Thank Whom We Forget to Thank Father God   Mother Inhuman Infant Cosmic Chthonic God of the Nucleus Dead God   Living God Alpha God    Zed God Whom We Name God Whom We Cannot Name When We Open Our Mouths With the Name God   Word God 4. The new day cancels dread And dawn forgives all sins, All the judgments of insomnia, As if they were only dreams. The ugly confrontation After midnight, with the mirror, Turns white around the edges And burns away like frost. Daylight undoes gravity And lightness responds to the light. The new day lifts all weight, Like stepping off into space. Where is that room you woke to, By clock-light, at 3 a.m.? Nightmare’s many mansions, Falling, have taken it with them. The new day, the day’s newness, And the wretchedness that, you thought, Would never, never depart, Meet—and there is goodbye. A bad night lies ahead And a new day beyond that— A simple sequence, but hard To remember in the right order. 5. Lord of dimensions and the dimensionless, Wave and particle, all and none, Who lets us measure the wounded atom, Who lets us doubt all measurement, When in this world we betray you Let us be faithful in another.

How fresh, oh Lord, how sweet and clean Are thy returns! even as the flowers in spring; To which, besides their own demean, The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring. Grief melts away Like snow in May, As if there were no such cold thing. Who would have thought my shriveled heart Could have recovered greenness? It was gone Quite underground; as flowers depart To see their mother-root, when they have blown, Where they together All the hard weather, Dead to the world, keep house unknown. These are thy wonders, Lord of power, Killing and quickening, bringing down to hell And up to heaven in an hour; Making a chiming of a passing-bell. We say amiss This or that is: Thy word is all, if we could spell. Oh that I once past changing were, Fast in thy Paradise, where no flower can wither! Many a spring I shoot up fair, Offering at heaven, growing and groaning thither; Nor doth my flower Want a spring shower, My sins and I joining together. But while I grow in a straight line, Still upwards bent, as if heaven were mine own, Thy anger comes, and I decline: What frost to that? what pole is not the zone Where all things burn, When thou dost turn, And the least frown of thine is shown? And now in age I bud again, After so many deaths I live and write; I once more smell the dew and rain, And relish versing. Oh, my only light, It cannot be That I am he On whom thy tempests fell all night. These are thy wonders, Lord of love, To make us see we are but flowers that glide; Which when we once can find and prove, Thou hast a garden for us where to bide; Who would be more, Swelling through store, Forfeit their Paradise by their pride.

—at Dubai International Airport and ending with a line by César Vallejo Because I must walk through the eye-shaped shadows cast by these curved gold leaves thick atop each constructed palm tree, past displays of silk scarves, lit silhouettes of blue-bottled perfume—because I grip, as though for the first time, a paper bag of french fries from McDonald's, and lick, from each fingertip, the fat and salt as I stand alone to the side of this moving walkway gliding me past dark- eyed men who do not look away when I stare squarely back—because standing in line to the restroom I want only to pluck from her black sweater this one shimmering blond hair clinging fast— because I must rest the Coke, cold in my hand, beside this toilet seat warmed by her thighs, her thighs, and hers. Here, at the narrow mouth of this long, humid corridor leading to the plane, I take my place among this damp, dark horde of men and women who look like me— because I look like them— because I am ashamed of their bodies that reek so unabashedly of body— because I can—because I am an American,a star

Creo que si ... I believe it will rain tomorrow ...

To stand for once outside my faith to steady it caught and squirming on a stick up to mind’s inviting light and name it! for all its faults and facets or keep waiting to be claimed in it

When Claude says blessed is he who has seen and believes, you know he is about to tell the one about bees. His father told him which kind of sting was worst, but you have to see some things for yourself, and when you ask how on earth do you catch a bee to see anything, he tells how you hunker down next to a sweet potato blossom and watch until one lands on the ruffled cuff and then ambles down into the sweeter sleeve. You lean over and pinch the blossom shut, and there you have it, ready to sting yourself so you can decide on your own, and he wants for you not to doubt this: even more blessed, you will be, you have heard — and not seen.

All morning, doing the hard, root-wrestling work of turning a yard from the wild to a gardener’s will, I heard a bird singing from a hidden, though not distant, perch; a song of swift, syncopated syllables sounding like,Can you believe this, believe this, believe? Can you believe this, believe this, believe?

I have no wit, no words, no tears; My heart within me like a stone Is numb'd too much for hopes or fears; Look right, look left, I dwell alone; I lift mine eyes, but dimm'd with grief No everlasting hills I see; My life is in the falling leaf: O Jesus, quicken me. My life is like a faded leaf, My harvest dwindled to a husk: Truly my life is void and brief And tedious in the barren dusk; My life is like a frozen thing, No bud nor greenness can I see: Yet rise it shall—the sap of Spring; O Jesus, rise in me. My life is like a broken bowl, A broken bowl that cannot hold One drop of water for my soul Or cordial in the searching cold; Cast in the fire the perish'd thing; Melt and remould it, till it be A royal cup for Him, my King: O Jesus, drink of me.

Who would have imagined that I would have to go a million miles away from the place where I was born to find people who would love me? And that I would go that distance and that I would find those people? In the dream JoAnne was showing me how much arm to amputate if your hand gets trapped in the gears of the machine; if you acted fast, she said, you could save everything above the wrist. You want to keep a really sharp blade close by, she said. Now I raise that hand to scratch one of those nasty little scabs on the back of my head, and we sit outside and watch the sun go down, inflamed as an appendicitis over western Illinois — which then subsides and cools into a smooth gray sea. Who knows, this might be the last good night of summer. My broken nose is forming an idea of what’s for supper. Hard to believe that death is just around the corner. What kind of idiot would think he even had a destiny? I was on the road for so long by myself, I took to reading motel Bibles just for company. Lying on the chintz bedspread before going to sleep, still feeling the motion of the car inside my body, I thought some wrongness in my self had made me that alone. And God said,You are worth more to me than one hundred sparrows.

To be blessed said the old woman is to live and work so hard God’s love washes right through you like milk through a cow To be blessed said the dark red tulip is to knock their eyes out with the slug of lust implied by your up-ended skirt To be blessed said the dog is to have a pinch of God inside you and all the other dogs can smell it