I don't often have conversations with God, but sometimes I do. I've always struggled to find you, o Lord, though you are all around me. I can't see your image. I can't hear your voice. But you must be somewhere, God. I surely hope so.
I don't often talk to you anymore, Lord. But sometimes you speak to me in your mysterious ways. I heard you yesterday, shortly after I woke up, and I mumbled something. Something so familiar, and yet - and yet so distant from me. I recognized the mumbling as poetry, but not the words, rather the cadence of it. In my younger days I used to know some poems by heart, a bit of 'The Raven', most of Hamlet's soliloquy, certainly Yeats's 'When you are old' and Davies's 'Leisure'. Maybe even 'I wandered lonely as a cloud'. But it was none of these I muttered, unknown and trembling words failing to coalesce. Throughout the day I found myself following this process, to no avail. I could see the shape of the poem, as if from afar, I could almost taste the words in my mouth, and though I knew this to be a poem that somehow revolved around nature or birds in flight, nothing in 'Leaves of grass' sated this fleeting ghost that sought to possess me. In vain I looked to songs, books and memories, but as the day wore on, I didn't come any closer to revelation.
And Lord, I heard you again today, as the memory of that evanescent poem lingered still inside me; I heard you in the song of another, a distant trill that heralds an outlier, one who still pursues the fading art of knife grinding. As that faraway song flew to my ears, so too did the words fly to my mouth and I at once started to recite Gerard Manley Hopkins's 'The Windhover', a beautiful - and very challenging - sonnet :
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.
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.
I never wanted you elsewhere, Lord, not in your house, not in the souls of your believers, but in the trees and in the waves, I never wanted you in your book and in those who'd defile our mother with its words, but in the touch and presence of something I'll never again have. I can only remember, Lord, and eventually, hope.
(And if they ever find me, tell the papers.)
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