immersion

There is anger abroad in the world, a numb thunder,

because of God's silence. But how naive,

to keep wanting words we could speak ourselves,

English, Urdu, Tagalog, the French of Tours,

the French of Haiti...

Yes, that was one way omnipotence chose

to address us - Hebrew, Aramaic, or whatever the patriarchs

chose in their turn to call what they heard. Moses

demanded the word, spoken and written. But perfect freedom

assured other ways of speech. God is surely

patiently trying to immerse us in a different language,

events of grace, horrifying scrolls of history

and the unearned retrieval of blessings lost for ever,

the poor grass returning after drought, timid, persistent.

God's abstention is only from human dialects. The holy voice

utters its woe and glory in myriad musics, in signs and portents.

Our own words are for us to speak, a way to ask and to answer.

~ Denise Levertov

from for lovers of god everywhere
Poems of the Christian Mystics
art by Hillal Hussain

 

 

 

sojourns in the parallel world

We live our lives of human passions,

cruelties, dreams, concepts,

crimes and the exercise of virtue

in and beside a world devoid

of our preoccupations, free

from apprehension--though affected,

certainly, by our actions. A world

parallel to our own though overlapping.

We call it "Nature"; only reluctantly

admitting ourselves to be "Nature" too.

Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,

our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,

an hour even, of pure (almost pure)

response to that insouciant life:

cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing

pilgrimage of water, vast stillness

of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,

animal voices, mineral hum, wind

conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering

of fire to coal--then something tethered

in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch

of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.

No one discovers

just where we've been, when we're caught up again

into our own sphere (where we must

return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)

–but we have changed, a little.

~ Denise Levertov

from Sands of the Well

for the asking

Augustine said his soul

was a house so cramped

God could barely squeeze in.

Knock down the mean partitions,

he prayed, so You may enter!

Raise the oppressive ceilings!

Augustine's soul 

 didn't become a mansion large enough

to welcome, along with God, the woman he'd loved,

except for his mother (though one, perhaps,

his son's mother, did remain to inhabit

a small dark room).  God, therefore,

would never have felt

fully at home as his guest.

Nevertheless,

it's clear desire

fulfilled itself in the asking, revealing prayer's

dynamic action, that scoops out channels

like water on stone, or builds like layers

of grainy sediment steadily

forming sandstone. The walls, with each thought,

each feeling, each word he set down,

expanded, unnoticed; the roof

rose, and a skylight opened.

~ Denise Levertov

from for lovers of god everywhere

by roger housden

 art by Yayoi Kusama

 

old joy

Come into animal presence

No man is so guileless as

the serpent. The lonely white

rabbit on the roof is a star

twitching its ears at the rain.

The llama intricately

folding its hind legs to be seated

not disdains but mildly

disregards human approval.

What joy when the insouciant

armadillo glances at us and doesn't

quicken his trotting

across the track and into the palm brush.

What is this joy? That no animal

falters, but knows what it must do?

That the snake has no blemish,

that the rabbit inspects his strange surroundings

in white star-silence? The llama

rests in dignity, the armadillo

has some intention to pursue in the palm-forest.

Those who were sacred have remained so,

holiness does not dissolve, it is a presence

of bronze, only the sight that saw it

faltered and turned from it.

An old joy returns in holy presence.

~ Denise Levertov

 from Poems: 1960-1967

She wrote: "I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer. I feel it in different degrees and not with every poem. But in certain ways writing is a form of prayer."

sojourns in the parallel world

We live our lives of human passions,

cruelties, dreams, concepts,

crimes and the exercise of virtue

in and beside a world devoid

of our preoccupations, free

from apprehension--though affected,

certainly, by our actions. A world

parallel to our own though overlapping.

We call it "Nature"; only reluctantly

admitting ourselves to be "Nature" too.

Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,

our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,

an hour even, of pure (almost pure)

response to that insouciant life:

cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing

pilgrimage of water, vast stillness

of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,

animal voices, mineral hum, wind

conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering

of fire to coal--then something tethered

in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch

of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.

No one discovers

just where we've been, when we're caught up again

into our own sphere (where we must

return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)

–but we have changed, a little.

~ Denise Levertov

from Sands of the Well

with thanks to Lisa at the mark on the wall

returning

You can live for years next door

to a big pine tree, honored to have

so venerable a neighbor, even

when it sheds needles all over your flowers

or wakes you, dropping big cones

onto your deck at still of night.

Only when, before dawn one year

at the vernal equinox, the wind

rises and rises, raising images

of cockleshell boats tossed among huge

advancing walls of waves,

do you become aware that always,

under respect, under your faith

in the pine tree’s beauty, there lies

the fear it will crash someday

down on your house, on you in your bed,

on the fragility of the safe

dailiness you have almost

grown used to.

~ Denise Levertov

.