445 Religion poems

A row of tall skinny candles burns quickly into the night air, the shames raised over the rest for its hard work. Darkness rushes in after the sun sinks like a bright plug pulled. Our eyes drown in night thick as ink pudding. When even the moon starves to a sliver of quicksilver the little candles poke holes in the blackness. A time to eat fat and oil, a time to gamble for pennies and gambol *shames: the middle candle that lights the others every night

Prosaic miles of streets stretch all round, Astir with restless, hurried life and spanned By arches that with thund’rous trains resound, And throbbing wires that galvanize the land; Gin-palaces in tawdry splendor stand; The newsboys shriek of mangled bodies found; The last burlesque is playing in the Strand— In modern prose all poetry seems drowned. Yet in ten thousand homes this April night An ancient People celebrates its birth To Freedom, with a reverential mirth, With customs quaint and many a hoary rite, Waiting until, its tarnished glories bright, Its God shall be the God of all the earth.

The songs we join in are beeswax candles burning with no smoke a clean fire licking at the evening our voices small flames quivering. The songs string us like beads on the hour. The ritual is its own melody that leads us where we have gone before and hope to go again, the comfort of year after year. Order: we must touch each base of the haggadah as we pass, blessing, handwashing, dipping this and that. Voices half harmonize on the brukhahs. Dear faces like a multitude of moons hang over the table and the truest brief blessing: affection and peace that we make.

XI A hundred generations, yes, a hundred and twenty-five, had the strength each day not to eat this and that (unclean!) not to say this and that, not to do this and that (unjust!), and with all this and all that to go about as men and Jews among their enemies (these are the Pharisees you mocked at, Jesus). Whatever my grandfathers did or said for all of their brief lives still was theirs, as all of it drops at a moment make the fountain and all of its leaves a palm. Each word they spoke and every thought was heard, each step and every gesture seen, by God; their past was still the present and the present a dread future’s. But I am private as an animal. I have eaten whatever I liked, I have slept as long as I wished, I have left the highway like a dog to run into every alley; now I must learn to fast and to watch. I shall walk better in these heavy boots than barefoot. I will fast for you, Judah, and be silent for you and wake in the night because of you; I will speak for you in psalms, and feast because of you on unleavened bread and herbs.

Seeing my friend’s son in his broad-brimmed hat and suspenders, I think of the Quakers who lectured us on nonviolent social action every week when I was a child. In the classrooms we listened to those who would not take up arms, who objected, who had accepted alternative service in distant work camps and showed slides of hospitals they helped to build. On Wednesdays, in Meeting for Worship, when someone rose to speak, all the energy in the room flew inside her mouth, empowering her to tell what she had seen on her brief encounter with the divine: sometimes, a parable, a riddle, a kindness. The fall that we were seventeen, we scuffed our loafers on the gravelly path from the Meetinghouse, while maple and elm leaves sailed around our shoulders like tiny envelopes, our futures sealed inside. Despite the war in Vietnam, I felt safer than I ever would again. Perhaps those aged, protective trees had cast a spell on us, or maybe the nonviolent Quaker God had set up a kingdom right there— suburban Philadelphia. Looking back, I see how good deeds and thoughts climbed with us to the attic room for Latin, descended to the gym for sports, where we hung from the praiseworthy scaffolds of righteous behavior. We prepared to leave for college, armed with the language of the American Friends and the memories of Thanksgiving dinners we’d cooked for the unfortunates: borrowing our parents’ cars to drive downtown to the drop-off point, racing back to play our last field hockey match. Grim center forwards shook hands before the whistle, the half-backs’ knee-pads strapped on tight; one varsity team vanquished another.

The merry World did on a day With his train-bands and mates agree To meet together where I lay, And all in sport to jeer at me. First Beauty crept into a rose, Which when I pluck'd not, "Sir," said she, "Tell me, I pray, whose hands are those?" But Thou shalt answer, Lord, for me. Then Money came, and chinking still, "What tune is this, poor man?" said he; "I heard in music you had skill:" But Thou shalt answer, Lord, for me. Then came brave Glory puffing by In silks that whistled, who but he? He scarce allow'd me half an eye: But Thou shalt answer, Lord, for me. Then came quick Wit and Conversation, And he would needs a comfort be, And, to be short, make an oration: But Thou shalt answer, Lord, for me. Yet when the hour of Thy design To answer these fine things shall come, Speak not at large, say, I am Thine; And then they have their answer home.

Adapted from the original notebook fragment written by Rainer Maria Rilke in Spain in 1913. Evidently, this was needed. Because people need to be screamed at with proof. But he knew his friends. Before they were he knew them. And they knew that he would never leave them there, desolate. So he let his exhausted eyes close at first glimpse of the village fringed with tall fig trees — immediately he found himself in their midst: here was Martha, sister of the dead boy. He knew she would not stray, as he knew which would; he knew that he would always find her at his right hand, and beside her her sister Mary, the one a whole world of whores still stood in a vast circle pointing at. Yes, all were gathered around him. And once again he began to explain to bewildered upturned faces where it was he had to go, and why. He called them “my friends.” The Logos, God’s creating word, — the same voice that said Let there be light. Yet when he opened his eyes, he found himself standing apart. Even the two slowly backing away, as though from concern for their good name. Then he began to hear voices; whispering quite distinctly, or thinking: Lord, if you had been here our friend might not have died

My mother forgets to feed her animals because it's only fair. She rushes to them when she hears hoarse roosters crowing and billy goats butting over a last straw. This month the moon becomes a princess. The stars fan her, Jupiter pours cups of wine, Mars sings melancholy mawals. Bearded men holding prayer beads and yellow booklets stare at her and point aching fingers at her waist. In our house we break a fast with dates from Huun and glasses of buttermilk. Then on to bowls of lamb soup flavored with mint, trays of stuffed grape leaves, spiced fava beans drenched in olive oil and lemon juice. And that is only the beginning. The spirits of Johnny Walker and gin hide in the trunks of white Peugeots. In the nightclubs of my city, waiters serve only non-alcoholic beer and belly dancers cover themselves. Father of sixteen children, our neighbor visits bringing two kilos of baklava. He washes them down with a dozen demitasses of sweet sage tea. Before dawn he runs to one of his two wives, both named Salma, and loves her hurriedly, his hands barely touching a breast.

All around the altar, huge lianas curled, unfurled the dark green of their leaves to complement the red of blood spilled there—a kind of Christmas decoration, overhung with heavy vines and over them, the stars. When the angels came, messengers like birds but with the oiled flesh of men, they hung over the scene with smoldering swords, splashing the world when they beat their rain-soaked wings against the turning sky. The child was bright in his basket as a lemon, with a bitter smell from his wet swaddling clothes. His mother bent above him, singing a lullaby in the liquid tongue invented for the very young—short syllables like dripping from an eave mixed with the first big drops of rain that fell, like tiny silver pears, from the glistening fronds of palm. The three who gathered there—old kings uncrowned: the cockroach, condor, and the leopard, lords of the cracks below the ground, the mountain pass and the grass-grown plain—were not adorned, did not bear gifts, had not come to adore; they were simply drawn to gawk at this recurrent, awkward son whom the wind had said would spell the end of earth as it had been. Somewhere north of this familiar scene the polar caps were melting, the water was advancing in its slow, relentless lines, swallowing the old landmarks, swelling the seas that pulled the flowers and the great steel cities down. The dolphins sport in the rising sea, anemones wave their many arms like hair on a drowned gorgon’s head, her features softened by the sea beyond all recognition. On the desert’s edge where the oasis dies in a wash of sand, the sphinx seems to shift on her haunches of stone, and the rain, as it runs down, completes the ruin of her face. The Nile merges with the sea, the waters rise and drown the noise of earth. At the forest’s edge, where the child sleeps, the waters gather— as if a hand were reaching for the curtain to drop across the glowing, lit tableau. When the waves closed over, completing the green sweep of ocean, there was no time for mourning. No final trump, no thunder to announce the silent steal of waters; how soundlessly it all went under: the little family and the scene so easily mistaken for an adoration. Above, more clouds poured in and closed their ranks across the skies; the angels, who had seemed so solid, turned quicksilver in the rain. Now, nothing but the wind moves on the rain-pocked face of the swollen waters, though far below where giant squid lie hidden in shy tangles, the whales, heavy-bodied as the angels, their fins like vestiges of wings, sing some mighty epic of their own— a great day when the ships would all withdraw, the harpoons fail of their aim, the land dissolve into the waters, and they would swim among the peaks of mountains, like eagles of the deep, while far below them, the old nightmares of earth would settle into silt among the broken cities, the empty basket of the child would float abandoned in the seaweed until the work of water unraveled it in filaments of straw, till even that straw rotted in the planetary thaw the whales prayed for, sending their jets of water skyward in the clear conviction they’d spill back to ocean with their will accomplished in the miracle of rain:And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit moved upon the face of the waters.

Having been tenant long to a rich lord, Not thriving, I resolvèd to be bold, And make a suit unto him, to afford A new small-rented lease, and cancel th’ old. In heaven at his manor I him sought; They told me there that he was lately gone About some land, which he had dearly bought Long since on earth, to take possessiòn. I straight returned, and knowing his great birth, Sought him accordingly in great resorts; In cities, theaters, gardens, parks, and courts; At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth Of thieves and murderers; there I him espied, Who straight,Your suit is granted, said, and died.