Emerging (excerpt)

(Found here)

Not as in the old days I pray,

God. My life is not what it was. . .

Once I would have asked healing.

I go now to be doctored. . .

to lend my flesh as manuscripts of the great poem

of the scalpel. I would have knelt

long, wrestling with you, wearing

you down. Hear my prayers, Lord, hear

my prayer. As though you were deaf, myriads

of mortals have kept up their shrill

cry, explaining their silence by

their unfitness.

It begins to appear

this is not what prayer is about.

It is the annihilation of difference,

the consciousness of myself in you,

of you in me. . . 

I begin to recognise

you anew, God of form and number.

There are questions we are the solution

to, others whose echoes we must expand

to contain. Circular as our way

is, it leads not back to that snake-haunted

garden, but onward to the tall city

of glass that is the laboratory of the spirit.

~R. S. Thomas