445 Religion poems

The hand and foot that stir not, they shall find Sooner than all the rightful place to go; Now in their motion free as roving wind, Though first no snail more limited and slow; I mark them full of labor all the day, Each active motion made in perfect rest; They cannot from their path mistaken stray, Though ’tis not theirs, yet in it they are blest; The bird has not their hidden track found out, Nor cunning fox, though full of art he be; It is the way unseen, the certain route, Where ever bound, yet thou art ever free; The path of Him, whose perfect law of love Bids spheres and atoms in just order move.

This season for us, the Jews— a season of candles, one more on the seven-branched candlestick for the seven days of the week, but let it be seven in the sense of luck in dice, seven of the stars in the constellations: Orion, Aldebaran in the sky lively over Jerusalem Let the fuel last the besieged       such as we are, to nourish us. Let the oil continue for heat, for illumination, flame crouching in the lamp, the glass smoky (December upon us) the light not fail. The air has been mild for days— & the 7 rings through my life despite the 8 of this week— bushes in the doorway of 7 Charles where I lived, 51, crackle with dryness, are bare still. That house with the lucky number brought me luck & misluck, both, like the other that added to 7, out of 4 & 3, that seven underlying the eight of this week, the 8 just over, the 7 just under a third of the years with Stefan: I praise them both today— the lasting oil in the seven-branched candlestick: absence of all fear—the smallest drop of fuel enough to leap from. new york, 1973

Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion, Scarce can endure delay of execution, Wait, with impatient readiness, to seize my Soul in a moment. Damned below Judas: more abhorred than he was, Who for a few pence sold his holy master. Twice betrayed, Jesus me, the last delinquent, Deems the profanest. Man disavows, and Deity disowns me: Hell might afford my miseries a shelter; Therefore hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all Bolted against me. Hard lot! encompassed with a thousand dangers; Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors, I’m called, if vanquished, to receive a sentence Worse than Abiram’s. Him the vindictive rod of angry justice Sent quick and howling to the centre headlong; I, fed with judgment, in a fleshly tomb, am Buried above ground.

And the fourth river is the Euphrates The first day was a long day and the first night nearly eternal. No thing existed, and only One was present to perceive what wasn’t there. No meaning as we know it; difference was bound in the All. On the first day, water, on the second day, land, on the third day, two kinds of light, one of them night. On the fourth day, laughter, and darkness saw it was good. But when God laughed, a crack ran through creation. On the fourth night, sorrow, staring away from heaven, torn in its ownness. No evidence then of nothing, but worlds upon worlds, underwritten, overflowing: the worlds of fear and of longing, lacking in belief, and the pitiful world of love, forever granting its own wishes. Out of dust, like golems, God created man and woman, and cast them into chance. And man was subdued in those days. All that could leap, leapt; all that could weep, wept. First of all places, Eden; last of all places, Cleveland; and a river flowed out of Eden, inspiring in the dry land a panic of growth and harvest season. The newly formed creation took from flesh its beast and from each word its sentence. And early loves and hatreds blew from thistle to thorn. Each thing that God created, he placed before man so that he may name it: cloudbank, hawk’s eye, lambkin,

For W.G. Sebald, 1944-2001 This was the work of St. Sebolt, one of his miracles: he lit a fire with icicles. He struck them like a steel to flint, did St. Sebolt. It makes sense only at a certain body heat. How cold he had to get to learn that ice would burn. How cold he had to stay. When he could feel his feet he had to back away.

I encountered a scaffold outside the Holy Trinity Church in Vladimir, Russia. At first I didn’t notice her slumped against the side of the church — she was pretty small for a scaffold, pretty un- assuming. Her safety mesh was torn in places and sun-bleached all over and threatened to dislodge due to a forceful wind that was typical of the season. She was shaking. She was fundamentally insecure. She told me that good foundations are essential and that the men who had put her together hadn’t taken advantage of the right opportunities. Now, each day, someone came by called her “unsafe” and also “a liability” then left, failing to initiate the dismantling process that yes would have been painful and slow, but kinder. International visitors to the church blamed her for the mess of tools and rags on the grounds and for the fact that they could no longer see the church’s celebrated mural depicting Saint Artemy of Verkola unusually pious highly venerated child saint killed by lightning. His dead body radiated light never showed signs of decay and was in fact said to have effected multiple miracles of healing. I said comforting things to the scaffold but she only seemed to lean more heavily against the side of the church. We are rarely independent structures she said before she dropped a bolt pin which released a long section of tube which released another bolt pin which released several wooden boards that scraped another tube and made an unbearable sound.

He thinks when we die we’ll go to China. Think of it—a Chinese heaven where, except for his blond hair, the part that belongs to his father, everyone will look like him. China, that blue flower on the map, bluer than the sea his hand must span like a bridge to reach it. An octave away. I’ve never seen it. It’s as if I can’t sing that far. But look— on the map, this black dot. Here is where we live, on the pancake plains just east of the Rockies, on the other side of the clouds. A mile above the sea, the air is so thin, you can starve on it. No bamboo trees but the alpine equivalent, reedy aspen with light, fluttering leaves. Did a boy in Guangzhou dream of this as his last stop? I’ve heard the trains at night whistling past our yards, what we’ve come to own, the broken fences, the whiny dog, the rattletrap cars. It’s still the wild west, mean and grubby, the shootouts and fistfights in the back alley. With my son the dreamer and my daughter, who is too young to walk, I’ve sat in this spot and wondered why here? Why in this short life, this town, this creek they call a river? He had never planned to stay, the boy who helped to build the railroads for a dollar a day. He had always meant to go back. When did he finally know that each mile of track led him further away, that he would die in his sleep, dispossessed, having seen Gold Mountain, the icy wind tunneling through it, these landlocked, makeshift ghost towns? It must be in the blood, this notion of returning. It skipped two generations, lay fallow, the garden an unmarked grave. On a spring sweater day it’s as if we remember him. I call to the children. We can see the mountains shimmering blue above the air. If you look really hard says my son the dreamer, leaning out from the laundry’s rigging, the work shirts fluttering like sails, you can see all the way to heaven.

I sigh for the heavenly country, Where the heavenly people pass, And the sea is as quiet as a mirror Of beautiful beautiful glass. I walk in the heavenly field, With lilies and poppies bright, I am dressed in a heavenly coat Of polished white. When I walk in the heavenly parkland My feet on the pasture are bare, Tall waves the grass, but no harmful Creature is there. At night I fly over the housetops, And stand on the bright moony beams; Gold are all heaven’s rivers, And silver her streams.

Simone Weil, 1909-1943 Only the stones at first Seem to have a part in this, And the little height of the grass As it gains a fraction-inch By gripping the shallow soil With all the shocking might Of hunger and of thirst, As if the soil itself Were all that's left on earth. I think the grass alone Can hold within its grasp What matters to it most, And still it looks bereft, And famished as the stones. I watch a stream of moths Proceeding on their ways, They carve out tortuous paths As if they were intent On entering unseen And ever-smaller doors. So four years into the war, And cut off from the ones Whose circumstance you felt And suffering as yours, You carved yourself a path Through ever-narrowing doors Of hunger and of thirst, And entered them day by day, Refusing all at first But that ration of food Your people could obtain Behind the lines in France, And then refusing that, From summer into fall You cut your ration back To send your part to them, Your part diminishing To rations cut in half And cut in half again, And then nothing at all But water at the last Sipped for the nurse's sake, You finally lacked the strength Even to lift your hands: Father, I cannot stand To think of them and eat. Send it to them, it is theirs. Send this food for them, For my people still in France. And turned your face away, As famished as the grass. Only the stones at first Seem to have a part in this, And the little height of the grass As it gains a fraction-inch. But hidden in the grass As if the grass itself Were giving out a cry, I overhear the finch Begin her native rhyme And toil to paraphrase Her version of your words. It seems she tries and tries Until the words come clear, It is theirs, she seems to say, Or that is what I hear, And again: It is theirs, it is theirs. And the plover joins in praise With her fluttering, murmured prayers: Send it to them, it is theirs. And the blackbirds breaking wide Take it up in their dialects To sing you in their way, I swear I can hear the words, Send it to them, they say, Send it to them, it is theirs, Then all the birds of the air Give thanks above your grave, As if they were your cause And those you meant to save, As if the birds were there In attendance at the end, And, seeing the sacrifice Had borne your body up, So wasted as it was, To your chair in Paradise, And saw, before they fled, Your first breathtaking act Before the heavenly feast, The bread set at your place: To refuse to eat till none On earth has less than you, Though God in pity take Your hands and lift them toward His table for your sake. Father, they have no food, Send it to them, it is theirs. And the birds returning here Give tongue to what they've heard, They tell the grass and stones And the stream of moths who carve Their tortuous paths in the air. But how in giving thanks Can we calculate the worth Of one who chose to starve? You held within your grasp Our hunger and our thirst. And the little height of the grass As it gains a fraction-inch Seems to have a part in this. It grips with a shocking might What matters to the last, As if the soil itself Were all that's left on earth, And all the earth were held Within its famished grasp.

For as long as I've known her, my mother's two things are going to Mass at Our Lady of Peace and playing bingo in North Hollywood. Guilty from leaving me at home all night, she'd bring a pink paper bag with Sanrio characters printed all over it. Every week would be different inside. The size of the bag would depend on if she got lucky that night or if she broke even, which she believed was the same as winning. Inside, there were stickers, pencils, a pencil case, paper, lollipops, a diary. It was the period when Pochacco just came out and I was skeptical of transitioning out of my love for Hello Kitty and onto smaller more obscure colorful characters. My mother knew this because she could read my mind, so she only bought Hello Kitty things. I would stay up until midnight and wait for when she'd pull up in her white Cadillac onto the concrete driveway. Smelling like Marlboro Reds which I associated with evil, she'd wake me up from being somewhere between half asleep & dreaming of a crush. But Hello Kitty lived in heaven, and my mother and I were not in heaven. We were in the San Fernando Valley, the porn capital. And on the way to Mass every Sunday, we would drive by houses with swimming pools where money shots were being made.