request and a poem

[theprohibition.livejournal.com]

Poetry about losing faith/finding faith in God or any belief system?

and in return, a poem that I love but isn't quite relevant:
"These are easy verses" by T.H. White

These are easy verses, which anybody can write
in a minute:
So that more than two or three at a time
Leave a taste in the mouth,
But oh my God
If I could once get from my heart
What is in it
About man and madness,
Ambition and the blood of boys -

Comments

[zagzagael.livejournal.com]

Poetry about losing faith/finding faith in God or any belief system?

Isn't that the definition of poetry?


:P

About lack of faith - not sure if this is relevant

[dreamerleo.livejournal.com]

L'Angoisse - Paul Verlaine

Nature, nothing of you moves me, neither the nourishing
fields, nor the rosy echo of Sicilian
Pastorals, nor the pomp of daybreak,
nor the doleful solemnity of sunsets.

I laugh at Art, I laugh at Man also, at the songs,
the verses, the Greek temples and the spiral towers
that cathedrals stretch into the empty heavens
and I see the good and the bad with the same eye.

I don't believe in God, I abjure and renounce
all thought, and as for that old irony,
Love, I'd like for no one to talk to me about it anymore.

Weary of living, afraid of dying, like
a lost ship, plaything of ebb and flow,
my soul sets sail for terrible shipwrecks.

Re: About lack of faith - not sure if this is relevant

[theprohibition.livejournal.com]

Lack of faith works, too! Thank you :)

Re: About lack of faith - not sure if this is relevant

[jesuslovesbono.livejournal.com]

Paul Verlaine...i have indeed heard that name.

here he reminds me of the Dealy Lama. a little.

Gerard Manley Hopkins: 40 (Carrion Comfort)

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

[catpaws.livejournal.com]

What God did not plan on - Stan Rice

Sleep well,
Weep well,
Go to the deep well
As often as possible.
Bring back the water,
Jostling and gleaming.

God did not plan on consciousness,
Developing so
Well. Well,
Tell him our
Pail is full
And He can
Go to Hell.

24. June 1993

Something like this, hopefully?

[honorat.livejournal.com]

Dover Beach -- Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

Aubade
Dick Davis

For Joshua Mehigan

These are the dawn thoughts of an atheist
Vaguely embarrassed by what looks like grace:
Though colors don't objectively exist,
And have no form, and occupy no space,

So that the carpet's sumptuous dyes must make
Bold arabesques untrue as Santa Claus,
And all Matisse's pigments are a fake
Fobbed off on us by intellectual laws,

And neither Fauve nor Esfahan survive
The deconstructed physics of our seeing –
Still we consent, and actively connive
In their unreal adjustments to our being.

So the thin rhetoric we use to cope
With being so peculiarly here,
Which cannot but be based on baseless hope
And self-constructed images of fear,

Serves to interpret what we are, although
We hesitate to say that what it says
Refers to anything that we could know
Beyond the mind's perpetual paraphrase . . .

And sensing that no quiddity remains
Outside the island sorceries of sense
(Queen Circe's simulacra in our brains
That make and unmake all experience)

Still, still we long for Light's communion
To pierce and flood our solitary gloom:
Still I am grateful as the rising sun
Picks out the solid colors of my room.

[with-rainfall.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this.

[gamesiplay.livejournal.com]

No problem. I love this poem so much.

[haggispatrol.livejournal.com]

Threshold

BY R. S. THOMAS

I emerge from the mind’s
cave into the worse darkness
outside, where things pass and
the Lord is in none of them.

I have heard the still, small voice
and it was that of the bacteria
demolishing my cosmos. I
have lingered too long on

this threshold, but where can I go?
To look back is to lose the soul
I was leading upwards towards
the light. To look forward? Ah,

what balance is needed at
the edges of such an abyss.
I am alone on the surface
of a turning planet. What

to do but, like Michelangelo’s
Adam, put my hand
out into unknown space,
hoping for the reciprocating touch?

[exceptindreams.livejournal.com]

- "That I Abide With Thee In Case You Wondered" by Maurice Manning (http://exceptindreams.livejournal.com/254112.html?thread=2796448)
- "i thank You God" by E. E. Cummings (http://exceptindreams.livejournal.com/71192.html)
- "New Religion" by Bill Holm (http://exceptindreams.livejournal.com/255899.html?thread=2808219)
- "Celestial Music" by Louise Glück (http://exceptindreams.livejournal.com/58247.html)
- "Vespers (Once I believed in you)" by Louise Glück (http://exceptindreams.livejournal.com/111716.html)
- "Faith" by Linda Pastan (http://exceptindreams.livejournal.com/123240.html)
- "The Drop and the Sea" by Kabir (http://exceptindreams.livejournal.com/128627.html)
- "Not So, Not So" by Anne Sexton (http://exceptindreams.livejournal.com/119525.html)

I hope those help.

[exceptindreams.livejournal.com]

Three more:
- "The Book of Pilgrimage, II, 22" by Rainer Maria Rilke (http://exceptindreams.livejournal.com/41138.html)
- "You Who Never Arrived" by Rainer Maria Rilke (http://exceptindreams.livejournal.com/132605.html)
- "Today, Like Every Other Day" by Rumi (http://exceptindreams.livejournal.com/125777.html)

[mswyrr]

To Nobodaddy
William Blake

Why art thou silent and invisible,
Father of Jealousy?
Why dost thou hide thyself in clouds
From every searching eye?
Why darkness and obscurity
In all thy words and laws,
That none dare eat the fruit but from
The wily Serpent's jaws?
Or is it because secrecy gains females' loud applause?

Jesus Dies
Anne Sexton

From up here in the crow’s nest
I see a small crowd gather.
Who do you gather, my townsmen?
There is no news here.
I am not a trapeze artist.
I am busy with my dying.
Three heads lolling,
bobbing like bladders.
No news,
The soldiers down below
laughing as soldiers have done for centuries.
No news,
We are the same men,
you and I,
the same sort of nostrils,
the same sort of feet.
My bones are oiled with blood
and so are yours.
My heart pumps like a jack rabbit in a trap
and so does yours.
I want to kiss God on His nose and watch Him sneeze
and so do you.
Not out of disrespect.
Out if pique.
Out of a man-to-man thing.
I want heaven to descend and sit on My dinner plate
and so do you.
I want God to put His steaming arms around Me
and so do you.
Because we need,
Because we are sore creatures.
My townsmen,
go home now.
I will do nothing extraordinary.
I will not divide in two.
I will not pick out My white eyes.
Go now,
this is a personal matter,
a private affair and God knows
none of your business.

Revelation
Richard Chess

Though there is no cure, he seeks one
In the discussions of the rabbis, in the shade
Of the eucalyptus, in the bones of St. Peter fish,
In the lyrics of Arik Einstein, in Gitanes.
Before sleep, uniform slumped
To the ground, pen capped, letter
To the prime minister sealed, he seeks a cure
In the expansive dark of the desert.
In the coffee house, enchanted by a folk singer.
In the shade of the eucalyptus, daydreaming.
Best to forget the offerings, how much oil and grain,
How many calves, how many pigeons.
Forget where the moon is in its cycle.
When the first set ends, when the shade moves,
He wills to carry the forgetting forward.
He wills to practice forgetting when he laces
His shoe, when he describes a recurring dream
To the prisoner who has a reputation
For his interpretations, when he gazes at a ship
On the horizon, when he wakes to the face
Facing his. This is the first time
He has seen her in morning light. What is the prayer?
She belongs to Christ, he remembers as he strokes
Her breast. He will forget this morning,
Like he forgot yesterday morning, their lying
Together late on a mattress issued by the state.
Though there is no cure, he seeks one
Where he works, in a novel, in the kiss
He receives from a rabbi of infinite patience.
He forgets fringes and his friends who have stepped
Outside for a smoke between sets. He forgets
Which of them has lately become a pacifist,
Which has purchased a ticket for the far east.
He wills to practice forgetting the scent
Of her hair, the taste of her tongue.
Though there is no cure, he seeks one
On the broken temple steps,
He seeks one in the morning light
Which reveals and reveals her face.

[mswyrr]

A Brief for the Defense
Jack Gilbert

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.