For you on this Monday: a sonnet from Irish farmer-turned-poet Patrick Kavanaugh.
I suppose there are those who might find heresy in this poem. “Pantheism,” they would say.
I don’t defend the idea. If God is everything and everything is God then what good is God, I wonder? And yet, I do not think that this is a heresy strong enough to deserve much disapproval (at least not today in the United States). We have silenced nature very effectively with our parking lots and our strip malls, our corporate ladders and our electronic shadow selves.
This poem reminds me to listen for the voice of God whispering all around.
I can’t prove that His is the voice you hear in water and wind. But, to borrow Kavanaugh’s words, some arguments aren’t meant to be proven.
Canal Bank Walk
Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal
Pouring redemption for me, that I do
The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal,
Grow with nature again as before I grew.
The bright stick trapped, the breeze adding a third
Party to the couple kissing on an old seat,
And a bird gathering materials for the nest for the Word
Eloquently new and abandoned to its delirious beat.
O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web
Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech,
Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib
To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.
– Patrick Kavanaugh
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