Poetry, April 9

[jade_sabre]

...it's still April 9th for someone on my f-list.

Anyway, I just got back (roundaboutly) from our Tenebrae service, and one of its main themes is darkness (how we're heading into it, how there's light at the end of the tunnel), and so I hunted and up popped this poem, which I'm not fully appreciating at this tired moment but which speaks to me already on a couple of levels, of frustration and weariness, of looking for beauty, everywhere. From G.K. Chesterton:

A Prayer in Darkness
THIS much, O heaven—if I should brood or rave,
   Pity me not; but let the world be fed,
  Yea, in my madness if I strike me dead,
Heed you the grass that grows upon my grave.

If I dare snarl between this sun and sod,
  Whimper and clamour, give me grace to own,
  In sun and rain and fruit in season shown,
The shining silence of the scorn of God.

Thank God the stars are set beyond my power,
  If I must travail in a night of wrath,
  Thank God my tears will never vex a moth,
Nor any curse of mine cut down a flower.

Men say the sun was darkened: yet I had
  Thought it beat brightly, even on—Calvary:
  And He that hung upon the Torturing Tree
Heard all the crickets singing, and was glad.

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[sartorias.livejournal.com]

*Chesterton love*