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Christianity, God is good, Jesus, Poems

Christian Poems II: Villa, Wilbur, Priest

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The Way My Ideas Think Me

Jose Garcia Villa (1965 or earlier)

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The way my ideas think me
Is the way I unthink God.
As in the name of heaven I make hell
That is the way the Lord says me.

And all is adventure and danger
And I roll Him off cliffs and mountains
But fast as I am to push Him off
Fast am I to reach Him below.

And it may be then His turn to push me off,
I wait breathless for that terrible second:
And if He push me not, I turn around in anger:
“O art thou the God I would have!”

Then he pushes me and I plunge down, down!
And when He comes to help me up
I put my arms around Him, saying, “Brother,
Brother.” . . . This is the way we are.

Source:  The Earth is the Lord’s: Poems of the Spirit, H Plotz, compiler (Oxford Univ Press 1971), 124-125.

_________

Hamlen Brook

Richard Wilbur

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At the alder-darkened brink
Where the stream slows to a lucid jet
I lean to the water, dinting its top with sweat,
And see, before I can drink,

A startled inchling trout
Of spotted near-transparency,
Trawling a shadow solider than he.
He swerves now, darting out

To where, in a flicked slew
Of sparks and glittering silt, he weaves
Through stream-bed rocks, disturbing foundered leaves,
And butts then out of view

Beneath a sliding glass
Crazed by the skimming of a brace
Of burnished dragon-flies across its face,
In which deep cloudlets pass

And a white precipice
Of mirrored birch-trees plunges down
Toward where the azures of the zenith drown.
How shall I drink in this?

Joy’s trick is to supply
Dry lips with what can cool and slake,
Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache
Nothing can satisfy.

Source: The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, JD McClatchy, ed (Vintage Books 1990), 142.

________

You Beckoned

Vicki Priest (Note:  imagine every other line indented; I couldn’t get it to format that way here.)

.

You beckoned, even teased
with that roar and
Crash of booming surf,
untamed power—
To my heart all
mystery and fear.

All from You swirling, pushing
the tiniest of particles,
Even uncountable molecules
in one roiling mass
Toward the shore, and there
spray and mist

Found my cheek, as if to
commune.  Such a light, longing
Touch cannot be put away.
Neither could my ears muffle
What seemed torrential tears.
I could not yet understand.

But through universe observing
that made me feel like death,
It came upon me to listen
to You through a singing voice;
You spoke love—like no other.
So I came to understand,

That that ominous, constant roar
is like my longing (and that of all
Creation) for fruition, full; and
It is Your affirming shout:
“It is done, you shall see,
come and dance with Me!”

Christianity, Jesus, Poems

Christian Poems I: Henderson, MacNeice, Greenwell

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There Was No

by Stewart Henderson

There was no grave grave enough
to ground me
to mound me
I broke the balm then slit the shroud
wound round me
that bound me
There was no death dead enough
to dull me
to cull me
I snapped the snake and waned his war
to lull me
to null me
There as no cross cross enough
to nil me
to still me
I hung as gold that bled, and bloomed
A rose that rose and prised the tomb
away from Satan’s willful doom
There was no cross, death, grave
or room
to hold me.

In The Poetic Bible, collected by Colin Duriez (Hendrickson Pub.s 2001), 159.

__________

And the Lord was not in the Whirlwind

by Louis MacNeice

And the Lord was not n the whirlwind.
He sat in the cave looking out and the cave was the world;
Or he sat in his office with in-tray and out-tray
While nobody, nothing, came in but typed memoranda
Although through the curtainless window the wind
was twirling the gas-drums
And whipping all London away into interstellar negation—
But the Lord was not in the whirlwind.
And the Lord was not in the atom.
He sat in a bar looking in (and the bar was the world)
On a high metal stool between intake and outlet
Still breathing in, breathing out, but nothing and no one
Passed the swing-doors while he waited and watched
his tumbler erupting
A genie that grew like a mushroom, deleting the
Words of Creation—
But the Lord was not in the atom.
Yet after all that or before it
As he sat in the cave of his mind (and the cave was the world)
Among old worked flints between insight and hindsight,
Suddenly Something, or Someone, darkened the entrance
But shed a new light on the cave and a still small
voice on the silence
In spite of ill winds and ill atoms blossomed in pure
affirmation
Of what lay behind and before it.

In The Earth is the Lord’s: Poems of the Spirit, H Plotz, compiler (Thomas Y Crowell Co 1965), 154.

__________

I am not Skilled to Understand

By Dora Greenwell (1800s)

I am not skilled to understand
What God hath willed, what God hath planned;
I only know at His right hand
Stands One who is my Savior.
I take Him at His word and deed:
“Christ died to save me,” this I read;
And in my heart I find a need
Of Him to be my Savior.
That He should leave His place on high
And come for sinful man to die,
You count it strange? so once did I
Before I knew my Savior.
And O that He fulfilled may see
The travail of His soul in me,
And with His work contented be,
As I with my dear Savior!
Yes, living, dying, let me bring
My strength, my solace, from this spring,
That He who lives to be my King
Once died to be my Savior!

In The One Year Book of Poetry, P Comfort and D Partner, compilers (Tyndale House Pub.s 1999).