This little boy
in suit and tie
23 years old
and talking at me.
The feel in the guts:
a wrung turn; burning.
The feel in the head:
a vice; a wiry line.
Woman there:
her badge
with deaf
penned on
like shouting.
My poor and blunted tongue.
A wrung turn or a wiry line, do you end up at the same point?
ReplyDeleteI imagine it's all part of the same closed circuit, Marie.
ReplyDeletePainful and moving poem. Only the trials and revelations of a life of service to the "children of lesser gods" could have informed this work.
ReplyDeletePut in mind of Voltaire's question to those who proposed an omniscient, omnipotent and infinitely merciful Deity: how then could such a Deity permit, for example, the birth of a child without a nose?
I found Him in the shining of the stars,
I marked Him in the flowering of His fields,
But in His ways with men I find Him not.
I waged His wars, and now I pass and die.
O me! for why is all around us here
As if some lesser god had made the world,
But had not force to shape it as he would,
Till the High God behold it from beyond,
And enter it, and make it beautiful?
Tennyson: Idylls of the King, chapter XII
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Children of a Lesser God
Thank you, Tom.
ReplyDeleteAs someone of faith, I have to let that question stand, that reasonable outrage burn; there are no adequate answers. Every day it'll inch in somewhere.
Long time since I'd read the Tennyson: in His ways with men I find Him not.
Too much glib talk about communication these days. What happens when the words don't work?
My father learnt some BSL when he was still teaching. It's not just the signs, he said. The whole of you is in it.
Perhaps faith, like hope, like courage, must finally be its own reward. Or are these merely more words. Is the whole of us in them. From the darkness outside the circle of light, hard to make out. Waiting for a chink in the wall to someday open maybe.
ReplyDeleteBut the wind will blow where it will. For those who have ears to hear it.
The plane has now touched down on tarmac, met by diplomatic cars. First stop...
All gods perhaps looking away. We're on our own. All's still in play. Until it's not.
Where is true security to be found?
Any rip in the prefabricated deterministic envelope...
This one's for you, Duncan my good man, sparked by more mere words (the Benedictine oratory), and yet, and yet...:
Dorothy Day: True Security