Poetry And Religion

 Religions are poems.
 They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture

into the only whole thinking: poetry.

Nothing's said till it's dreamed out in words
and nothing's true that figures in words only.


A poem, compared with an arrayed religion,
may be like a soldier's one short marriage night
to die and live by.
 But that is a small religion.
 

Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition;
like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete
with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that?

You can't pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn;
you can't poe one either.
 It is the same mirror:
mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,

fixed centrally, we call it a religion,
and God is the poetry caught in any religion,
caught, not imprisoned.
 Caught as in a mirror

that he attracted, being in the world as poetry
is in the poem, a law against its closure.

There'll always be religion around while there is poetry

or a lack of it.
 Both are given, and intermittent,
as the action of those birds - crested pigeon, rosella parrot -
who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.

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