Lesbia Harford: Verses about Faith

I made a heaven for you filled with stars,
Each star a song
Meant to give happy music to your ear,
Day and night long.
But in your workshop you are closed away
From the fair sky,
Deafened by noise until you cannot hear
My stars that sigh.
And when night comes your sleepy eyes are blind
To heavens blue;
That was a foolish toy, my dearest dear,
I made for you.

I am no mystic. All the ways of God
Are dark to me.
I know not if he lived or if he died
In agony.
My every act has reference to man.
Some human need
Of this one, or of that, or of myself
Inspires the deed.
But when I hear the Angelus, I say
A Latin prayer
Hoping the dim incanted words may shine
Some way, somewhere.
Words and a will may work upon my mind
Till ethics turn
To that transcendent mystic love with which
The Seraphim burn.

Today
I'd like to be a nun
And go and say
My rosary beneath the trees out there.
In this shy sun
The raindrops look like silver beads of prayer.
So blest
Am I, I'd like to tell
God and the rest
Of heaven-dwellers in the garden there
All that befell
Last week. Such gossip is as good as prayer.
Ah well!
I have, since I'm no nun,
No beads to tell,
And being happy must be all my prayer.
Yet 'twould be fun
To walk with God 'neath the wet trees out there.

When I am so worn out I cannot sleep
And yet I know I have to work next day
Or lose my job, I sometimes have recourse
To one long dead, who listens when I pray.
I ask Saint Rose of Lima for the sleep
She went without, three hundred years ago
When, lying on thorns and heaps of broken sherd,
She talked with God and made a heaven so.
Then speedily that most compassionate Saint
Comes with her gift of deep oblivious hours,
Treasured for centuries in nocturnal space
And heavy with the scent of Lima's flowers.

One comes to love the little saints,
As years go by.
One learns to love the little saints.
'O hear me sigh,
St. Anthony,
Find this for me,
I wish you'd try.'
There must be many garden gods,
A gardener sees.
There'd have to be an orchard god. 'Divinities,
Take honour due.
The long year through
Protect these trees.'
The Mother and the Holy Child
Are friends to me.
I pray, 'I am my mother's child.
I trust you'll see
That days are bright
And all goes right
With her and me.'

Each day I sit in an ill-lighted room
To teach a boy;
For one hour by the clock great words and dreams
Are our employ.
We read St Agnes' Eve and that more fair
Eve of St Mark
At a small table up against the wall
In the half-dark.
I tell him all the wise things I have read
Concerning Keats.
'His earlier work is overfull of sense
And sensual sweets.'
I tell him all that comes into my mind
From God-knows-where,
Remark, 'In English poets Bertha's type
Is jolly rare.
She's a real girl that strains her eyes to read
And cricks her neck.
Now Madeline could pray all night nor feel
Her body's check.
And Bertha reads, p'rhaps the first reading girl
In English rhyme.'
It's maddening work to say what Keats has said
A second time.
The boy sits sideways with averted head.
His brown cheek glows.
I like his black eyes and his sprawling limbs
And his short nose.
He, feeling, dreads the splendour of the verse,
But he must learn
To write about it neatly and to quote
These lines that burn.
He drapes his soul in my obscuring words,
Makes himself fit
To go into a sunny world and take
His part in it.
'Examiners' point of view, you know,' say I,
'Is commonsense.
You must sift poetry before you can
Sift Evidence.'