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.
..............................
A poem for those times we are taken aback by the givenness of life, and the inner imperative that reminds us of the givingness that is at the heart of what Jesus called life more abundant. I've often thought about a cycle of 31 poems, collected into a booklet, and used one a day for 6 months, call it Psalms of the Poets perhaps.
The hunger for awe and the awareness of the vast rock faced mountain that is God's categorical imperative to seek, and climb and risk falling in order to climb; or to live the alternative metaphor, standing in the spray of torrential water hurtling over the cliff, the self-sacrifice and passionate surrender of that
"............................Vast
flood of mercy
flung on resistance."
Levertov was such a brilliant expositor of human longing and divine elusiveness, human devotion and divine amplitude, our capacity for finitude and God's infinite mercy.
And so, today begins, with a willingness to lie beneath the tree, stand barefoot at the waterfall, know however fleetingly, the drenching spray of mercy.
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