On Saturday I went to a poetry reading somewhat awkwardly called "What are poets for in an age of ecological crisis?" Six Australian poets read their work. One, whose poetry I found hard to grasp, gave the best answer to the question: "to a poet, every part of the poem is equal," he said, and this attitude is valuable more generally as one thinks about ecology. Another read a religious poem called "Master of energy and silence" which I found wonderful, particularly the middle stanza (... or perhaps only the middle stanza). Sadly Blogspot won't let me reproduce the format: every second line should be indented:
Master of energy and silence,
Embracer of Contradictions
Who withdraws behind death
Like horizons we never touch
Who can be One and Many
Like light refracted through glass,
Stepping in and out of logic
Like a child unsure of the sea
In and out of time
Like an old man dozing, waking,
In and out of history
Like a needle through cloth,
Who we chase and bother with theories
Who hides in equations and wind
Who is constant as the speed of light
Who stretches over the Empty Place
Who hangs the Earth upon Nothing
Who strikes like lightning.
The poet is Kevin Hart, and I found the poem in an anthology he edited, The Oxford Book of Australian Religious Verse (Melbourne, etc.: OUP, 1994), 89. Originally from England, Hart was a long time in Melbourne, and has only recently left - for a professorship in Theology and Literature at the University of Notre Dame. Indiana's climate has led him, he said, to write more about snow than was decent for an Australian poet.
