445 Religion poems

Oh, I said, this is going to be. And it was. Oh, I said, this will never happen. But it did. And a purple fog descended upon the land. The roots of trees curled up. The world was divided into two countries. Every photograph taken in the first was of people. Every photograph taken in the second showed none. All of the girl children were named And. All of the boy children named Then.

And surfaced a flame in the dark elsewhere of one remembered form: just one, suppose it the flesh of unspecified man a mouth down deeper between my legs his heavy beard in the beginning against these wet thighs our bodies scribbled in signs to draw the grey curtain of steam back by which we found ourselves surrounded sound of water off the tile (or on this sheet of paper stammering) by which we came to nestle a will from which the colors rose resilient sparks of orange over the waves of trickled hair on chest and forearm light green to trace the conduits formed by vein of biceps and prick the pink ridges of his brown nipples in brackets raised this tongue in blue translucent embers to emanate where a moon of fingers along the dark red notch of earth is a field over which armies raged with catapults of burning stones until all was left there smoldering below.

I am God— Without one friend, Alone in my purity World without end. Below me young lovers Tread the sweet ground— But I am God— I cannot come down. Spring! Life is love! Love is life only! Better to be human Than God—and lonely. Originally appeared in the October 1931 issue of Poetry magazine.

In the ancient days, when the first quiver of speech came to my lips, I ascended the holy mountain and spoke unto God, saying, “Master, I am thy slave.  Thy hidden will is my law and I shall obey thee for ever more.” But God made no answer, and like a mighty tempest passed away. And after a thousand years I ascended the holy mountain and again spoke unto God, saying, “Creator, I am thy creation.  Out of clay hast thou fashioned me and to thee I owe mine all.” And God made no answer, but like a thousand swift wings passed away. And after a thousand years I climbed the holy mountain and spoke unto God again, saying, “Father, I am thy son.  In pity and love thou hast given me birth, and through love and worship I shall inherit thy kingdom.” And God made no answer, and like the mist that veils the distant hills he passed away. And after a thousand years I climbed the sacred mountain and again spoke unto God, saying, “My God, my aim and my fulfillment; I am thy yesterday and thou are my tomorrow.  I am thy root in the earth and thou art my flower in the sky, and together we grow before the face of the sun.” Then God leaned over me, and in my ears whispered words of sweetness, and even as the sea that enfoldeth a brook that runneth down to her, he enfolded me. And when I descended to the valleys and the plains God was there also.

In his malodorous brain what slugs and mire, Lanthorned in his oblique eyes, guttering burned! His body lodged a rat where men nursed souls. The world flashed grape-green eyes of a foiled cat To him. On fragments of an old shrunk power, On shy and maimed, on women wrung awry, He lay, a bullying hulk, to crush them more. But when one, fearless, turned and clawed like bronze, Cringing was easy to blunt these stern paws, And he would weigh the heavier on those after. Who rests in God’s mean flattery now? Your wealth Is but his cunning to make death more hard. Your iron sinews take more pain in breaking. And he has made the market for your beauty Too poor to buy, although you die to sell. Only that he has never heard of sleep; And when the cats come out the rats are sly. Here we are safe till he slinks in at dawn But he has gnawed a fibre from strange roots, And in the morning some pale wonder ceases. Things are not strange and strange things are forgetful. Ah! if the day were arid, somehow lost Out of us, but it is as hair of us, And only in the hush no wind stirs it. And in the light vague trouble lifts and breathes, And restlessness still shadows the lost ways. The fingers shut on voices that pass through, Where blind farewells are taken easily .... Ah! this miasma of a rotting God!

We dressed for church.  I had a white hat and white gloves when I was fifteen, no joke. You had to do that to show God you cared. God's eyes were stained glass, and his voice was pipe organ. He was immortal, invisible, while my panty-hose itched and my atheist father chewed his tongue and threatened to run out the door but didn't for my mother's sake, and she swallowed her fate, this marriage, like a communion cracker, and my brain- damaged brother lurched around the church nursery, and my sweeter sister watched me with huge brown eyes to see what I'd do next. My God, why did I turn my eyes upward when we were all there, then, in the flesh? I am so sorry about God, sorry we fastened that word to the sky. God's not even legal in Hebrew. If you get the vowel caught between the two consonants of your lips, it can carry you dangerously up like a balloon over what you'd give anything to be in the middle of, now.

After the trumpets, after the incense There were nights insomnia fathered gods I then rejected as too angry or distracted, Or whose appetite for submission revealed Their own lack of faith.Say our names, All synonyms for trust.

I, peregrine of noon.

Sometimes it takes miles to give up resistance, though the mirror shows a body unresisting, shows perhaps something to admire. Others may. A body without difficulty loosening, breaking its own willfulness, cracking itself like a rusted bolt that finally begins to turn. A body that turns. Toward openness, fantasy, those desires of and not of the body. Sometimes I notice a powerful man engaged steadily repeating difficult action: folding himself, his tight skin, over and over, lifting a declined torso or pulling up a suspended trunk, and think, how neat, how controlled to be inside that body. I struggle not to stare, grip myself not to lose myself inside the thought of being inside that body. I can never get there I know because it is the image I want, the veneer of muscle having taken primacy from mind, now first among equals: bicep, abdominal, quadricep, the launch after launch of a perpetual run. I want the image even when I am it, or nearly it— because even then, I am also that other thing, self-conscious, burdened, struggling for movement. If there is a link between God and animals— the way He identifies with the so much that isn’t us, as He had to have, to have made them— it must be in the body enacting will immediate through movement, as if with a word creating a world (enacting creation immediate through speech). Which is to say, this is my time of prayer, my only time: miles in, as long as it takes for the body to relinquish resistance. Bright, public, surrounded by others who move toward better movement. And all the while seeing in a wall of mirrors that image of myself, deer, horse, running close kin to breathing, motion necessary to survival, perfect image of a man that I’m merely a self-conscious copy of. I pray for things, of course, for myself and for those whose pain touches me, selfish and unselfish prayers for intimates and strangers. I pray for the runner in the mirror, too, sleek, easy animal, unselfconscious and present, and absent as a god, the man who could almost be me, who I do my best to rush toward. I pray that one day, by His grace, we may meet.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs — Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.