**Spiritual Poetry Thread**

Don't surrender your loneliness
So quickly.
Let it cut more deep.

Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.

Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft,
My voice,
So tender,

My need of God
Absolutely
Clear.

- Hafiz, 14th century Persian poet

This poem has a lot of personal meaning for me:

____________________
I lost my easy God - the one whose name
I knew since childhood.
I knew his temper, his sullen outrage, his ritual forgiveness...
I never told him how he frightened me,
how he followed me as a child
When I played with friends or begged for candy
on Halloween...
He the mysterious took all mystery away,
corroded my imagination,
Controlled the stars and would not let them
speak for themselves.

Now he haunts me seldom: some fierce umbilical is broken.
I live with my own fragile hopes and sudden rising despair.
Now I do not weep for my sins; I have learned to love them and
to know that they are the wounds that make love real...
I walk alone, but not so terrified as when he held my hand...
Perhaps I have no God - what does it matter?
I have beauty and joy and transcending loneliness,
I have the beginning of love - as beautiful as it is feeble,
as free as it is human...

I sense the call of creation, I feel its swelling in my hands,
I can lust and love, eat and drink, sleep and rise,
but my easy God is gone - and in his stead
The mystery of loneliness and love.

- "My Easy God", Fr. James Kavanaugh

Loaves & Fishes, by David Whyte:

This is not
the age of information

This not
the age of information

Forget the news
and the radio
and the blurred screen

This is the time
of loaves
and fishes

People are hungry
and one good word is bread
for a thousand

Job 7:11

Therefore I will not restrain my mouth;
I will speak in the anguish of my spirit;
I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.

Am I the sea, or a sea monster,
that thou settest a guard over me?

When I say, "My bed will comfort me, my couch will ease my complain," then thou dost scare me with dreams and terrify me with visions,
So that I would choose strangling and death rather than my bones.

I loathe my life; I would not live for ever.
Let me alone, for my days are a breath.

I wrote this poem this morning, on a lark. I wrote it in Spanish first and then translated it into English. Sometimes I like to write things in Spanish first because it helps me to "strip away" some of the wordsy crap that likes to sneak into my writing. (If you have some constructive criticism of my admittedly non-native Spanish or of my English version, feel free to offer it.)

Hope you like it. I have no title for it.

________________

Tu, esa fuerza inalcanzable y inesperado esperanza,
Que a todos momentos me encierre en brazos de viento susurrando,
Que me besa con rayas de luz de la luna,
Y me da todo lo bueno y lo malo paque me haga tu obra maestra:
Solo pido una cosa:
Que sigues dandome lo que queda en esta vida
Sea por mi aprovecha o por mi derrota
Porque eres Tu ese que me busca,
Por estos momentitos de raridad, claridad de vista,
Momentos en que veo
Otra vez,
Que nunca puedo vivir lejos de Ti.

You, that unsurpassed force and unhoped-for hope,
Which in every moment encircles me in whispering breezes,
Who kisses me with rays of moonlight,
And gives me every good and bad thing, so that I become your work of art:
I ask for only one thing:
That You keep giving me whatever is left in this life
Whether it be for my good or ill
Because it is You who looks for me,
Through these glances of strangeness, of clear vision,
Moments when I see
Once again,
That I can never live away from You.