A Lover Who Wants Lovers Near

God is

sweet that way,

trying to coax the world to dance.

Look how the wind holds the trees in its hands

helping them to

sway.

Look how the sky takes the fields and the oceans

and our bodies in its arms, and moves

all beings toward

Her lips.

God must get hungry for us; is God not also

a lover who wants lovers 

near?

- Rabia -

Artist: Maureen L. White, www.urbanpasturesart.com

To Live in the Mercy of God

To lie back under the tallest
oldest trees. How far the stems
rise, rise
before ribs of shelter
open!

To live in the mercy of God. The complete
sentence too adequate, has no give.
Awe, not comfort. Stone, elbows of
stony wood beneath lenient
moss bed.

And awe suddenly
passing beyond itself. Becomes
a form of comfort.
Becomes the steady
air you glide on, arms
stretched like the wings of flying foxes.
To hear the multiple silence
of trees, the rainy
forest depths of their listening.

To float, upheld,
as salt water
would hold you,
once you dared.

To live in the mercy of God.

To feel vibrate the enraptured
waterfall flinging itself
unabating down and down
to clenched fists of rock.
Swiftness of plunge,
hour after year after century,
O or Ah
uninterrupted, voice
many-stranded.
To breathe
spray. The smoke of it.
Arcs
of steelwhite foam, glissades
of fugitive jade barely perceptible. Such passion—
rage or joy?
Thus, not mild, not temperate,
God’s love for the world. Vast
flood of mercy
flung on resistance.

Denise Levertov

Artist: Maureen L. White, www.urbanpasturesart.com

War and Victory

Give me no gift of weapons
nor feelings of victory.
I want no triumph.
Let me fight, but lose!

Give me heroic stubbornness in love,
unending heart,
to give friendship without measure,
to forgive without end.

Only grant me strong bright senses
to bring happiness, to help, to hear the needs
of even a pulse-beat,
the call of any person!

- Abraham Joshua Heschel -

Artist: Maureen L. White, www.urbanpasturesart.com

Psalm 90

God acts within every moment
and creates the world with each breath.
He speaks from the center of the universe,
in the silence beyond all thought.
Mightier than the crash of a thunderstorm,
mightier than the roar of the sea,
is God's voice silently speaking
in the depths of the listening heart.

Artist: Maureen L. White, www.urbanpasturesart.com

Wearing Only My Questions

I knock on the door of the universe.

Here, this small villa, this table, this pen.

I ask the universe: What? and Why?

Now weakened, I must remake the world,

One grain at a time . . .

I knock on the door of the universe, asking:

What makes the light of the stars?

What makes the heat of my flesh?

What makes the tear shape of rain? . . .

So much I’ve lost,

I have nothing

Except a fierce hunger

To fathom this world.

Naked, I knock on the door,

Wearing only my questions.

- Alan Lightman -

Artist: Maureen L. White, www.urbanpasturesart.com

The Windhover

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
    dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
    As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
    Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
    
   No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
    Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

                      - (To Christ Our Lord) Gerard Manley Hopkins -

Artist: Maureen L. White, www.urbanpasturesart.com

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things – 

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; 

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; 

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; 

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; 

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. 

All things counter, original, spare, strange; 

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) 

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; 

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 

                                Praise him.

         

                        - Gerard Manley Hopkins -

Artist: Maureen L. White, www.urbanpasturesart.com