SELECTED POEMS
ON RELIGIOUS THEMES
Contents
Foreword by the Author
I The Tide
Human Being
Of Being
The Avowal
‘The Holy One …’
‘I learned that her name was Proverb.’
A Calvary Path
Candlemas
Angus Dei
Flickering Mind
On a Theme by Thomas Merton
Standoff
On the Mystery of the Incarnation
Variation on a Theme by Rilke
Psalm Fragments (Schnittke String Trio)
Suspended
The Tide
’In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being’
The Beginning of Wisdom
Altars
To Live in the Mercy of God
Primary Wonder
II Believers
Poetics of Faith
St. Peter and the Angel
Caedmon
The Servant-Girl at Emmaus
Conversion of Brother Lawrence
Dom Helder Camara at the Nuclear Test Site
The Showings: Lady Julian of Norwich
Annunciation
III Canjectures
On the Parables of the Mustard Seed
What the Figtree Said
A Heresy
IV Fish and a Honeycomb
Salvator Mundi: Via Crucis
On a Theme from Julian’s Chapter XX
Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell
On Belief in the Physical Resurrection of Jesus
St. Thomas Didymus
Ascension
NOTES
Foreword
Included here are poems from seven separate volumes, the earliest dating from 1978; and although the sequence is not wholly chronological it does, to some extent, trace my own slow movement from agnosticism to Christian faith, a movement incorporating much of doubt and questioning as well as of affirmation. Other poems imagine historical personages (e.g. St. Peter, Caedmon, Brother Lawrence) or with some temerity attempt to enter as deeply as I could into crucial events of the New Testament. This enterprise in what I think of as do-it-yourself theology seemed at the time of writing to risk presumption, but I later discovered it was much like what Ignatius of Loyola recommended in the ‘Exercises.’
The raison d’être for such a selection, along with a companion volume of ‘nature’ or ‘ecologically concerned’ poems is a demand from quite a few readers for a compact thematic grouping of poems which were originally published in various separate books. I don’t really like segregating poems, and there are so many (mine and others’) which overlap in theme or resist all categorization; yet I have to acknowledge that when reading on somewhat specialized occasions (e.g. at a rally for some peace and justice cause, or to a group of ecologists, or at a spiritual retreat) I have picked out the poems which seemed most relevant—and to do so has involved inconvenient hopping from book to book. This volume is conceived, then, as a convenience to those readers who are themselves concerned with doubt and faith and, though they read a wide variety of poems, like to have a focussed single volume at times, to stuff in a pocket or place at their bedside.
— Denise Levertov
PART ONE
The Tide
Human Being
Human being—walking
in doubt from childhood on: walking
a ledge of slippery stone in the world’s woods
deep-layered with wet leaves—rich or sad: on one
side of the path, ecstasy, on the other
dull grief. Walking
the mind’s imperial cities, roofed-over alleys,
thoroughfares, wide boulevards
that hold evening primrose of sky in steady calipers.
Always the mind
walking, working, stopping sometimes to kneel
in awe of beauty, sometimes leaping, filled with the energy
of delight, but never able to pass
the wall, the wall
of brick that crumbles and is replaced,
of twisted iron,
of rock,
the wall that speaks, saying monotonously:
Children and animals
who cannot learn
anything from suffering,
suffer, are tortured, die
in incomprehension.
This human being, each night nevertheless
summoning—with a breath blown at a flame,
or hand’s touch
on the lamp-switch—darkness,
silently utters,
impelled as if by a need to cup the palms
and drink from a river,
the words, ‘Thanks.
Thanks for this day, a day of my life.’
And wonders.
Pulls up the blankets, looking
into nowhere, always in doubt.
And takes strange pleasure
in having repeated once more the childish formula,
a pleasure in what is seemly.
And drifts to sleep, downstream
on murmuring currents of doubt and praise,
the wall shadowy, that tomorrow
will cast its own familiar, chill, clear-cut shadow
into the day’s brilliance.
Of Being
I know this happiness
is provisional:
the looming presences—
great suffering, great fear—
withdraw only
into peripheral vision:
but ineluctable this shimmering
of wind in the blue leaves:
this flood of stillness
widening the lake of sky:
this need to dance,
this need to kneel:
this mystery:
The Avowal
For Carolyn Kizer and John Woodbridge,
Recalling Our Celebration
of Georqe Herbert’s Birthday, 1983
As swimmers dare
to lie face to the sky
and water bears them,
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain
freefall, and float
into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,
knowing no effort earns
that all-surrounding grace.
‘The Holy One, blessed be he, wanders again,’ said Jacob, ‘He is wandering and looks for a place where he can rest.’
Between the pages
a wren’s feather
to mark what passage?
Blood, not dry,
beaded scarlet on dusty stones.
A look of wonder
barely perceived on a turning face —
what, who had they seen?
Traces.
Here’s the cold inn,
the wanderer passed it by
searching once more
for a stable’s warmth,
a birthplace.
‘I learned that her name was Proverb.’
And the secret names
of all we meet who lead us deeper
into our labyrinth
of valleys and mountains, twisting valleys
and steeper mountains—
their hidden names are always,
like Proverb, promises:
Rune, Omen, Fable, Parable,
those we meet for only
one crucial moment, gaze to gaze,
or for years know and don’t recognize
but of whom later a word
sings back to us
as if from high among leaves,
still near but beyond sight
dra
wing us from tree to tree
towards the time and the unknown place
where we shall know
what it is to arrive.
A Calvary Path
Where the stone steps
falter and come to an end
but the hillside rises
yet more steeply,
obtruded roots of the pines
have braided themselves
across the path to continue
the zigzag staircase.
In times past the non-human —
plants, animals—
often, with such gestures,
intervened in our lives,
or so our forebears
believed when all lives were seen
as travellings-forth of souls.
One can perceive
few come here now—
it’s nothing special,
not even very old,
a naive piety,
artless, narrow. And yet
this ladder of roots
draws one onward, coaxing
feet to become
pilgrim feet, that climb
(silenced by layers
of fallen needles,
but step by step
held from sliding)
up to the last
cross of the calvary.
Candlemas
With certitude
Simeon opened
ancient arms
to infant light.
Decades
before the cross, the tomb
and the new life,
he knew
new life.
What depth
of faith he drew on,
turning illumined
towards deep night.
Agnus Dei
Given that lambs
are infant sheep, that sheep
are afraid and foolish, and lack
the means of self-protection, having
neither rage nor claws,
venom nor cunning,
what then
is this ‘Lamb of God’?
to nuzzle at milky dugs,
woolbearer, bleater,
leaper in air for delight of being, who finds in astonishment
four legs to land on, the grass
all it knows of the world?
With whom we would like to play,
whom we’d lead with ribbons, but may not bring
into our houses because
it would soil the floor with its droppings?
What terror lies concealed
in strangest words, O lamb
of God tbat taketh away
the Sins of the World: an innocence
smelling of ignorance,
born in bloody snowdrifts,
licked by forebearing
dogs more intelligent than its entire flock put together?
God then,
encompassing all things, is
defenseless? Omnipotence
has been tossed away, reduced
to a wisp of damp wool?
And we
frightened, bored, wanting
only to sleep till catastrophe
has raged, clashed, seethed and gone by without us,
wanting then
to awaken in quietude without remembrance of agony,
we who in shamefaced private hope
had looked to be plucked from fire and given
a bliss we deserved for having imagined it,
is it implied that we
must protect this perversely weak
animal, whose muzzle’s nudgings
suppose there is milk to be found in us?
Must hold to our icy hearts
a shivering God?
•
So be it.
Come, rag of pungent
quiverings,
dim star.
Let’s try
if something human still
can shield you,
spark
of remote light.
Flickering Mind
Lord, not you,
it is I who am absent.
At first
belief was a joy I kept in secret,
stealing alone
into sacred places:
a quick glance, and away—and back,
circling.
I have long since uttered your name
but now
I elude your presence.
I stop
to think about you, and my mind
at once
like a minnow darts away,
darts
into the shadows, into gleams that fret
unceasing over
the river’s purling and passing.
Not for one second
will my self hold still, but wanders
anywhere,
everywhere it can turn. Not you,
it is I am absent.
You are the stream, the fish, the light,
the pulsing shadow,
you the unchanging presence, in whom all
moves and changes.
How can I focus my flickering, perceive
at the fountain’s heart
the sapphire I know is there?
On a Theme by Thomas Merton
‘Adam, where are you?’
God’s hands
palpate darkness, the void
that is Adam’s inattention,
his confused attention to everything,
impassioned by multiplicity, his despair.
Multiplicity, his despair;
God’s hands
enacting blindness. Like a child
at a barbaric fairgrounds —
noise, lights, the violent odors—
Adam fragments himself. The whirling rides!
Fragmented Adam stares.
God’s hands
unseen, the whirling rides
dazzle, the lights blind him. Fragmented,
he is not present to himself. God
suffers the void that is his absence.
Standoff
Assail God’s hearing with gull-screech knifeblades.
Cozen the saints to plead our cause, claiming
grace abounding.
God crucified on the resolve not to displume
our unused wings
hears: nailed palms
cannot beat off the flames of insistent sound,
strident or plaintive,
nor would God renege.
Our shoulders ache. The abyss
gapes at us.
When shall we
dare to fly?
On the Mystery of the Incarnation
It’s when we face for a moment
the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know
the taint in our own selves, that awe
cracks the mind’s shell and enters the heart:
not to a flower, not to a dolphin,
to no innocent form
but to this creature vainly sure
it and no other is god-like, God
(out of compassion for our ugly
failure to evolve) entrusts,
as guest, as brother,
the Word.
Variation on a Theme by Rilke
(The Book of Hours, Book I, Poem 4)
All these images (said the old monk,
closing the book) these inspired depictions,
are true. Yes—not one—Giotto’s,
Van Eyck’s, Rembrandt’s, Rouault’s,
how many others’—
not one is a fancy, a willed fiction,
each of them shows us exactly
the manifold countenance
of the Holy One, Blessed be He.
The seraph buttress flying
to support a cathedral’s external walls,
the shadowy ribs of the vaulted sanctuary:
aren’t both—an
d equally—
the form of a holy place? —whose windows’ ruby
and celestial sapphire can be seen
only from inside, but then
only when light enters from without?
From the divine twilight, neither dark nor day,
blossoms the morning. Each, at work in his art,
perceived his neighbor. Thus the Infinite
plays, and in grace
gives us clues to His mystery.
Psalm Fragments (Schnittke String Trio)
This clinging to a God
for whom one does
nothing.
A loyalty
without deeds.
•
Tyrant God.
Cruel God.
Heartless God.
God who permits
the endless outrage we call
History.
Deaf God.
Blind God.
Idiot God.
(Scapegoat god. Finally
running out of accusations
we deny Your existence.)
•
I don’t forget
that downhill street
of spilled garbage and beat-up cars,
the gray faces
looking up, all color
gone with the sun—
disconsolate, prosaic twilight
at midday. And the fear
of blindness.
It’s harder to recall
the relief when plain
daylight returned
subtly, softly,
without the fuss
of trumpets.
Yet
our faces had been upturned
like those of gazers
into a sky of angels
at Birth or Ascension.
•
Lord, I curl in Thy grey
gossamer hammock
that swings by one
elastic thread to thin
twigs that could, that should
break but don’t.
•
I do nothing, I give You
nothing. Yet You hold me
minute by minute
from falling.
Lord, You provide.
Suspended
I had grasped God’s garment in the void
but my hand slipped
on the rich silk of it.
The ‘everlasting arms’ my sister loved to remember
must have upheld my leaden weight
from falling, even so,
for though I claw at empty air and feel
nothing, no embrace,