Starry Conception

The fact that astronomies change 
while the stars abide 
is a true analogy 
of every realm of human life and thought, 

religion not least of all. 

No existent theology 
can be a final formulation of 
spiritual truth.

- Harry Emerson Fosdick
(arranged quote)

A prayer in the wind

Places have memories. It scares us

to think so. I am like bamboo, placeless,
transplanted somewhere new, staked
with foreign weather. But I

remember. We pause in our work, turn
our faces up to rain, our open mouths, one
after one. We think desire is enough.

It’s not. We build our privacies, impenetrable,
thin. We want places to remember us.

- Eva Saulitis, Prayer 28

Morning Poem

Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange

sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches ---
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it

the thorn
that is heavier than lead ---
if it's all you can do
to keep on trudging ---

there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted ---

each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,

whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.

- Mary Oliver

The Distances

This house, pitched now
The dark wide stretch
Of plains and ocean
To these hills over
The night-filled river,
Billows with night,
Swells with the rooms
Of sleeping children, pulls
Slowly from this bed,
Slowly returns, pulls and holds,
Is held where we
Lock all distances!

Ah, how the distances
Spiral from that
Secrecy:
Room,
Rooms, roof
Spun to the huge
Midnight, and into
The rings and rings of stars.

—Henry W. Rago

Sweet Servitude

A really efficient totalitarian state
would be one in which the
all-powerful executive of political bosses
and their army of managers
control a population of slaves
who do not have to be coerced,
because they love their servitude.

― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
(arranged quote)