(1) Sown
Lord, could I help it that I nearly saw
the colors of the wind? nearly heard
a singing deep in stone? Was it Thy law
I must so closely fail? And Thy word,
which breaks itself into the thousand names,
came broken in my heart. A thousand shivers
to carry were my love; no two were sames;
two raindrops were to me two gleaming rivers.
I loved them all: and so I came divided,
knowing the leaves in green but also brown.
No light fell but it was double-sided,
smithered over the steep roofs of the town
in sharpnesses as of a broken mirror,
showing me break with need to see it nearer.
(2) Huntsman
Searching the day as ever for Thy word,
I know, Lord, that I shall not find Thy face.
For from a child, I have ever heard
Thou art in ‘truth,’ in ‘spirit’ – not in place.
Yet being made by Thee to need in Thee,
knowing Thy face is far, I seek Thy faces
of harmony – art Thou not harmony? –
where the ash tree’s thin but highest-branching places
are live against the sky – giving to dearth,
to emptiness or heaven where Thou must be
(needing the weak but stabbing shapes of earth
to prod Thee into forms that I can see?)
their little green, yet fuller of life as yet
than the Face I never saw and don’t forget.
(3) Yoke
Lord, why was a pair of eyes my given?
Given a more than one but less than all? –
I, made for to see, light-driven,
able to see the rise and yet the fall
of sun, but not its staying into more –
circle or aught unnumbered, out of the weather
in ever, where each either with its or
round in a rose’s heart will ring together?
To the single-eyed, a shrub’s but a pennant – gay
flag of the light of a day – but it was more
in me: I saw that blossom brought away
in darkness: and I saw its seed before
it ever opened her in agony
for beauty and for more: for love of me.
--Lloyd Haft (from Where Is the Body That Will Hold?, 1998)