Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires
Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art
Like a fish,
That pants and thrashes,
Out of its salty oceans,
I gasp for you, Lord.
I am no amphibian.
Though I may flap
in a flourish of activity,
I gain nothing by it
when I am out of your world,
when your oxygen does not flood my gills.
You are the sea in which I must swim.
Your words the salt I need for happiness.
Without you,
I slowly die,
inside.
I am in a bad mood,
Irritable, cross,
Tinder waiting for a match.
How then do I ask
For your Spirit
To inhabit
This tense habitation
Of grumpiness?
But need I hesitate?
You are a waterfall,
That can sweep away
My dust and ashes
In an instant.
You are the wild fire
That can consume
The brush and bracken in me,
The wind that can overplant my drab heart
With blood-red poppies.
Just one touch of the King
Changes everything.
Veni Sancte Spiritus.
Come Holy Spirit
My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone,
And left me in this dreary world alone?
Thy form is here indeed—a lovely one—
But thou art fled, gone down a dreary road
That leads to Sorrow’s most obscure abode.
For thine own sake I cannot follow thee
Do thou return for mine.From Shelley’s Notebooks
The Clothes Pin
How much better it is
to carry wood to the fire
than to moan about your life.
How much better
to throw the garbage
onto the compost, or to pin the clean
sheet on the line,
With a gray-brown wooden clothes pin
