the kindlings

I'm posting a poem I just finished yesterday. It's a bit lengthy but if you have the time to look at it I'd appreciate any feedback you might have. I'd like to submit this one (which is why I'm posting it here now rather than wait to show you at the end of August.) Some of the references will make fuller sense if you've read Matthew Arnold's famous poem Dover Beach in which the poet finds in the sea, once an analogy for faith, the ebbing of belief and hope until all that's left is merely human love.

Antiqus



Dockweiler Beach

I

The Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces.
Is 25:8

I came to find myself upon this strand
My chest to test against the sea,
To find if once for all I'd been unmanned
Or if some virtue held with me.

When last I left my print upon this shore
I was thirteen and broken as
A wave against the stone my father bore
Upon his cloak of fresh-laid grass.

I threw myself into the breaking waves,
My body lithe and taut with youth,
As though to throw a stone at Him Who saves,
For death belied His promised truth.

In raucous foam I thrashed about until
A tranquil light appeared above;
Around in all directions azure hills
Illumined with empathic love.

II

Whoever therefore is not illuminated by splendors as great as those to be found in created things is blind...
St. Bonaventure

Yet ceaseless seasons change their lights and years
Have run their course through heaven's tract.
Forever marching forth titanic spheres
Prohibit man from turning back.

A silver dusting now adorns my head
As silver marks the span of time
Since then, when burdened with that mortal dread,
On ocean waves I sought to climb -

And climbing sought to reach a safer height
Above the frightful risk of love;
On rolling swells I grieved his vanished light
With grief the sea alone could move.

Now love has died again, a living death
This time - my own - for she still lives
While vanquished I now labor for my breath
And suffer what the mind relives.

Above and west hangs heaven's glowing lamp,
The ocean flicks up drops of light,
Smooth sand beneath my feet is cool and damp,
The green waves cresting brilliant white.

A thought descends from where a sea-gull glides:
Was Arnold right? and Sophocles?
Is hopelessness supplied by edgeless tides,
Are faith and love just vanities?

As hunted men who fled across dank moors
In ages past were left to try
Their waning hope against cathedral doors,
To nature's church I bring my cry:

O saving sea! Receive me once again!
Dissolve the tears on land unshed,
Unleash your fearsome force upon this pain;
"Crucify!" is the word I said.

With thunderous crash the heaving brine denied
The light; tumultuous and cold
The ocean's undercurrent, unespied,
Secreted me within its hold.

Then - umbral light, opaque, a gleaming glaze
Above my shadowed eyes, and air
Where sea gives way; indigotic hues and haze
Combine and issue everywhere.

III

Father, you are holy indeed,
and all creation rightly gives you praise.
Liturgy of the Eucharist, Eucharistic Prayer III

So far from Dover Beach where, it is said,
The note of ebbing faith was heard to moan,
I see creation readied on its own
As though to offer thanks and praise instead.
Organic sacramentals find their place:
The ocean like a cobalt altar cloth
Unfurled across the table of the world,
Impervious to time's consuming moth;
A humid, misty incense lightly whirls
Toward the open heart of cosmic space;
Surrounding wavelets gleam like lighted wicks,
Or souls of those deceased as yet unclaimed
By heaven's righteous Judge; they wait unnamed
The promised whitened tablet He'll affix.
In tune with all of this, pelagic hymns
Transform the grating roar the poet found
So sad - a dreary tone of sundry rocks -
To modern man's enlightened ear this sound
Convinces him that all creation mocks
Belief in sacred light that never dims.
Yet listen twice, you'll hear the hope of man
Suggesting all subsists within a plan.

Let Sophocles abide Aegean woe
And tragedy, yet waters also laugh;
I've scanned Earth's shores and found faith's afterglow
Where Arnold only heard its epitaph.
I find no basis now for man's regret
Since I and something more than I have met.
Ah, Lord! such love attends this natural mass!
What alchemy converts our skeptic eyes
but Faith, which through the world (not from) does pass
Believing what creation testifies.