445 Religion poems

On Fourteenth street the bugles blow, Bugles blow, bugles blow. The red, red, red, red banner floats Where sweating angels split their throats, Marching in burlap petticoats, Blow, bugles, blow. God is a ten car Bronx express, Red eyes round, red eyes round. "Oh where is my lustful lamb tonight, His hair slicked down and his trousers tight? I'll grind him back to my glory light!" Roll, subway, roll. Heaven is a free amusement park, Big gold dome, big gold dome. Movies at night: "The life she led." Everyone sleeps in one big bed. The stars go around inside your head. Home, sweet home. On Fourteenth street the bugles blow, Bugles blow, bugles blow, The torpid stones and pavements wake, A million men and street-cars quake In time with angel breasts that shake, Blow, bugles, blow!

Most glorious Lord of life, that on this day, Didst make thy triumph over death and sin: And having harrow'd hell, didst bring away Captivity thence captive, us to win: This joyous day, dear Lord, with joy begin, And grant that we for whom thou diddest die, Being with thy dear blood clean wash'd from sin, May live for ever in felicity. And that thy love we weighing worthily, May likewise love thee for the same again: And for thy sake, that all like dear didst buy, With love may one another entertain. So let us love, dear love, like as we ought, Love is the lesson which the Lord us taught.

Adam, a brown old vulture in the rain, Shivered below his wind-whipped olive-trees; Huddling sharp chin on scarred and scraggy knees, He moaned and mumbled to his darkening brain; ‘He was the grandest of them all—was Cain! ‘A lion laired in the hills, that none could tire; ‘Swift as a stag; a stallion of the plain, ‘Hungry and fierce with deeds of huge desire.’ Grimly he thought of Abel, soft and fair— A lover with disaster in his face, And scarlet blossom twisted in bright hair. ‘Afraid to fight; was murder more disgrace? ... ‘God always hated Cain’... He bowed his head— The gaunt wild man whose lovely sons were dead.

The epitaphios of Thessaloniki From those few famous silkworms smuggled Into Constantinople in the head of a walking stick Silk waterfalls Poured from the ancient bolts Into now-destitute reservoirs Of church treasuries in Aachen, In Liège, in Maastricht, in Sens, In the Sancta Sanctorum of the Vatican, Bright rivers seeping past The age when a teaspoonful of Silkworm eggs the size of one grain Could endow a church, The age when the letters in the words Of sacred testaments were Unreeled in the coastal cities of Asia Minor, When a bookworm conspired To wrest a maze of empty roads Through the words My Lord— That ancient, flickering text Once permanently affixed By blind but face-picturing, speechless But law-breaking wooden shuttles, Now a heap of gold wires displayed With a crumbling silk vestment someone Plucked from a shovelful of dust During one of those treasure hunts conducted In the burying grounds, in other eras, A shovelful of dust Now blowing into your eyes, As if a storm wind from Paradise Blew the rumors of this death So hard you must cover your eyes Before the museum case. The late afternoon tugs At a gold thread you can hear fraying When you close your eyes, A thread you feel your way along, A thread at which the invisible globe pulls, Leading you to the end of the world Where there is a pile of Clothes stolen from the grave, Where your fear is relegated To a masterwork of silk slaves— That He is dead. Here death is only a flash of worlds Unfurled from a rifled Church treasury, and you are invited To walk this alluvial wave of gold, To walk in the labyrinths Of the angels’ howls, To run your hands along the walls Of the silk thread’s passageways, To feel with your fingers The angels’ barbaric, stifled, Glittering vowels Tightly woven with gold wires. If you were to tug at one, Unraveling the angels Into a vivid labyrinth of thread From the fourteenth century Backwards to the scissors blade A seraph takes to a fragile Filament of gilt According to a law still unrevealed, The shroud would disappear In the gust of a little breeze From this door left ajar Into the next life, The threshold we cross with closed eyes— Where angels hide behind their backs The saws with which they mean To saw the present from the past, Oblivious to the scarlet threads That prove to be hidden among The filaments, those red rivers Running through the theme of time So shockingly—so before you set foot there, Take heed. This is the work Of Byzantine silk slaves confined To the palace grounds at Constantinople, And you must beware. There was a way station On the Silk Road Where the authorities executed Traitors in a wooden box In innumerable, unspeakable ways. When you touch this shroud from the east You take that hundred feet of road. You must walk softly past. You must try not to look. The torrent of words—later, later. Here tongues are cut out, And that is why the howling Is mute, Gilded, herringboned. Because although this is death, It is the work of slaves Whose task was only To expose the maximum amount of gold thread To the ceiling price of so many nomismata Per square inch, in a swift mischief Of curious knots, of mazes Flashing past, of straight paths Made inextricable, So look again. The angels wring their hands Over a statue. They are deranged, But not by grief. They mourn Not a body, but a work in bronze. They do not bring a mortal to the grave. But we onlookers who grieve and grieve— We cannot relegate this thought To a glory woven cryptically In heavy silks; We cannot consign it, sweep it off, For we cannot weigh In our palms the empty cocoons, We cannot study Within the secret workshops Of the silkworm, We cannot touch the boiling Water where the spools whirl, We cannot learn firsthand The bleakness of the craft With which God made the world, We cannot recount the legend that, When they met face-to-face, both God and the worm laughed.

I am in Rome, Vatican bells tolling a windowful of God and Bernini. My neighbor, the Pope, has died and God overnight, has wept black mantles over the sainted stone age whose skirted shadows flit through to the main cave. I nurse a cold. It must be error to sniffle in sight of holiness. “Liquids,” the doctor said. He has no cure, but since I have my choice, I sip champagne. If I must sit dropsical to Heaven, let me at least be ritual to a living water. In the crypt under the cave the stone box in its stone row has been marked for months now. My neighbor knew where he was going. I half suspect I, too, know, and that it is nothing to sneeze at, but am left to sneeze. I drink my ritual Moët et Chandon and wish (my taste being misformed for the high authentic) I had a California—a Korbel or an Almaden. I like it “forward,” as clerics of such matters say, not schooled to greatness. It is loud in Heaven today and in the great stone school my neighbor kept. The alumni procession of saints is forming for him. Bells clobber the air with portents. I sniffle and sneeze, wad kleenex, and sip champagne, trying to imagine what it might be to take part in a greatness, or even in the illusion of something like. The experience might deepen my character, though I am already near the bottom of it, among wads and butts of what was once idea. And the last swallow I do not like the after-taste, if that is what I am tasting. But this is ritual. I toast my neighbor: may he find his glass, and may its after-taste be all that he was schooled to.

Wrapped in gold foil, in the search and shouting of Easter Sunday, it was the ball of the princess, it was Pharoah’s body sleeping in its golden case. At the foot of the picket fence, in grass lank with the morning rain, it was a Sunday school prize, silver for second place, gold for the triumphant little dome of Ararat, and my sister took me by the hand and led me out onto the wide, wet lawn and showed me to bend into the thick nests of grass, into the darkest green. Later I had to give it back, in exchange for a prize, though I would rather have kept the egg. What might have coiled inside it? Crocuses tight on their clock-springs, a bird who’d sing himself into an angel in the highest reaches of the garden, the morning’s flaming arrow? Any small thing can save you. Because the golden egg gleamed in my basket once, though my childhood became an immense sheet of darkening water I was Noah, and I was his ark, and there were two of every animal inside me.

Who will you point to? In the needle's eye, or selling what you won at the strait gate, who will know how to kiss you and just when to pull the hair at your neck and say your name? No single victim will ever be the last. Not, at least, until one victim purifies the whole issue of suffering by crying out that his pain means nothing because it comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. The clusters of exiles in their storefronts will be free then. History will end. Lover will take her hand from her lover's mouth and see only his mouth, not a sightless fish's eye scored onto the sheet's marble. It's a wise child who knows it is no angel. The rest of us grow up hovering, visiting our lives in the moment of pain or orgasm or when the little fingers of pity push inside us and we feel loved. Our suffering gales beneath our wings like applause. We long to repeat it, to explain it to stay aloft and clear our lives in that mid-heaven of nostalgia and apology. We hover over the camps, the forced retreats, the ends of nations that no one can recall now except as code words for catastrophe. We alight for pleasure, touching the victims as the hurt husband touches the bed his wife has left. Father loved you with a passion. Or else from fear of your long, inarticulate future, he turned silent, edging into crank broadcasts by a small radio on the screened porch. Perhaps, as my father did, he moved out into another house and had a daughter with a redheaded woman who mistook his silence for grief. My father never lost anything. For years, I went to school with the daughter as she grew fat and her red hair reached her knees. Who were the victims? At what moment should my father have cried out, the mothers have cried out, or I have taken the fat hand of my sister and walked off through the needle's eye? And it's a wise child who can understand that the mothers and fathers on the trains see only the receding pastorals, the lamplit villages of other angels, and that his suffering is only one pinpoint on a lithic hoarding of departures each passenger reads like an advertisement of heaven. The wise child goes crazy. How could he not? How could he not be heartbroken to learn that even compassion is compassionless, that it uses the real or imagined pain of others and himself for wings, for memory, for a marriage proposal, for the cruel angelism that adores victims and makes a fifth, airier element out of pain? We recede. We recede. A virus finds that place deepest behind the heart where it unweaves itself into a pattern of false starts like knots of villages and the one house lightening at the crest of a green street as its doors close to us. Dearest, that is another crime of pluralism. Hope, jagged with beginnings, scatters our one real life among a dozen houses, little illnesses of longing whose low fevers contract the heart. You have but one heart. And I have one. At the crest of a green street we give them away. The night thanks us. The fences shiver with cats, and the flowers close. Feeling comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. It is not a train. It is not one instance of lovemaking or a lifetime spent together running the dogs, dying finally face down in the yard bed of herbs. We are all the same. Or, rather, we should believe we are the same in order to be happy with the same things and not to be stealing from each other. We put each other in camps. I crush my lover with a kiss and then it is impossible to love her. What must die if we are to live without barbed wire and bad sex is the very idea of otherness. And to kill the idea, we have merely to find one victim in ourselves who will die for nothing. My father could not stop getting children. The people on the trains cannot stop watching the passing villages for their own ghosts and early angels. I cannot stop finding houses in which to lose my heart a dozen times in the fits and starts of a little passion exalted. Life is not going to be bearable, I think, for a long time. The exiles will play cards in their storefront lodges. History will slide on. And one will pull the hair at my neck. And one will cover my mouth as she makes love to me. The streets are snowed in under heaven's leaflets. Our beds are scored with the sightless eyes, the eyes of others. The air is sickeningly heavy with applause.

After Denise Levertov Must be a stumbler, bleeder, as some floccus remains here, carded into ragged sleeves by barbed wire. I’d believe in a God who can learn to work new spindles, new pupils uncomprehending the reasons light rosins in winter, and still spill clumsily, bleeding. Now drizzle caught in oily pockets loads the fleece with wealth. I’ve often wondered what the fence keeps out in a country bereft of predators. I long ago reconciled instinctive sympathy for the perfect innocence of animals with an equally ardent carnivory. Arms retreat guilt-free through the widest breach in the garment, having chosen a meal the stauncher faiths call impassible, withdrawing to empty folds. I hope you feel safe when you die.

At supper he whispers something in your ear, the Judas boy, who wants you. We go to the garden where it’s cool and wait. From my place against the tree I see you through the window, watch as you walk from door to desk, reach into your pocket, pull out your wallet, empty it and leave it by the lamp, pick up a pen, lean over to write, then don’t, take something heavy from the drawer, put it back then sweep the money into a paper bag. You walk from desk to door and out, your hand reaching back to put out the light. On the security film you leave the building alone, holding the heavy bag. Off camera you walk towards the Charles, leave your saddle shoes under the pedestrian bridge. We wait in the garden. And wait. We don’t know yet whom you meet or why. We don’t know yet that the river has claimed you.

After reading Dr Rieu’s translation of St Mark’s Gospel. Who is this that comes in splendour, coming from the blazing East? This is he we had not thought of, this is he the airy Christ. Airy, in an airy manner in an airy parkland walking, Others take him by the hand, lead him, do the talking. But the Form, the airy One, frowns an airy frown, What they say he knows must be, but he looks aloofly down, Looks aloofly at his feet, looks aloofly at his hands, Knows they must, as prophets say, nailèd be to wooden bands. As he knows the words he sings, that he sings so happily Must be changed to working laws, yet sings he ceaselessly. Those who truly hear the voice, the words, the happy song, Never shall need working laws to keep from doing wrong. Deaf men will pretend sometimes they hear the song, the words, And make excuse to sin extremely; this will be absurd. Heed it not. Whatever foolish men may do the song is cried For those who hear, and the sweet singer does not care that he was crucified. For he does not wish that men should love him more than anything Because he died; he only wishes they would hear him sing.