Login   Sign Up 



 

The Naïve Modern God

by seanfarragher 

Posted: 25 July 2005
Word Count: 433
Summary: This Unitarian looks at his beliefs and ideology and dances with theology
Related Works: Books from the Bible • Finally Nothing -- • Fountain of Youth • La Fin de la Lolita (revised) • Living Will – Ecclesiastes 12 • Modern Man Discovers Dark Matter • Moral Man/Immoral Society after Reinhold Niebuhr (1932) • Stations of the Cross • What is; that is • What Rough beast (Revised) • Wonderful History -- • 

Font Size
 


Printable Version
Print Double spaced


The Naïve Modern God

“O He gives to us His joy,
That our grief He may destroy:
Till our grief is fled and gone
He doth sit by us and moan.”

William Blake --
“Songs of Innocence
On Another's Sorrow”


The Naïve Modern God

Our naïve God recoils from the falcon’s gyre;
it resists the tumble of the sun’s circular trail
when it, crazed and without the last ozone books
of Herodotus, races soldiery to narrate desperate
defense while enigmatic birds revive cipher
of dark matter with stem cells of unpredictable ghosts
gathered from the dust of make shift dynamite.

Yeats' spirit raised to Ben Bulbin in Sligo church
yields within small lead coffin a larger blaze
resisted by idolatry predictably set in outer rings
of sacraments and horrible sins of nature
that pretend to wobble within the truth of hoops
and stairs that meander within varied mountain
crossed while battered layers of sticks and stones
from every past cannot resolve lies with mystery
now resolved to unfold the end of the Brief
of how we fake god without any predictable
script proven by holy recursive forms before
mapmakers and wheelers fake revised history
scheduled to spit down one exit pass another to
win violent crash as the legs of the dead and
fornicate as splendor without jewels or pestilence.

When you leave Euclid’s hall where first thought
slipped into that indeterminate cawl,
and the end of words and phrase lisp
to twine resists perfect human storms
drowned in gray horizon to rascal story
without recursive formulary as corollary.

The problem exists: if I cannot know Zed
before X, if the elements whatever degree
are not predictable excitement, generous sorrow,
and engagement. We are accident.
I cannot sculpt God from sacred river mud
or scrambled logic substituted as opaque clouds
fashioned in reds and greens with sienna soil.

Great Spirit, if true, has flaked to fire lead
frayed without fair voice while wild birds
mislead by feint of prayer and Priests will
not restore memory to God as their “ka kaws”
melts from their beaks interred first before
claws to wing their patience as great mural
of the war of man and beast, signs of the cross
gathered in the sand, left alive in dunes
not measurable as Yeats said of man.

I remember last days more than apocalypse.
Wild feathered birds, their air bridled by
incontinent stare from human witness
cannot ascend the gyre, no Yeats in hand, to kiss
where reason has no answer for human things
while Blake sings innocence, experience waits:
“He doth sit by us and moans.”





XX






Favourite this work Favourite This Author


Comments by other Members



Cornelia at 23:23 on 25 July 2005  Report this post
I can't understand any of this, although I recognise some references to Yeats.Is the Great Spirit a reference to native American beliefs, I wonder, and there may be some Aztec in here, but what are the ozone books of Herodotus?


Sheila

seanfarragher at 02:59 on 26 July 2005  Report this post
Herodotus creative narrative history, and ozone today is being depleted and is part of the narrative history of today. Ancient classic ideas with contemporary allusions.

Cornelia at 07:57 on 26 July 2005  Report this post
Ah, thanks. That is helpful. What with all this bombing I had quite forgotten the ozone. 'Last ozone books' still doesn't make sense to me, but I think I am beginning to get a handle on your technique. I think I'm not well-read enough, but that's not true - I just don't read the right stuff that would clue me in.


Sheila

Felmagre at 09:01 on 26 July 2005  Report this post
Must admit I too was puzzled, thought it was an 'elegant' outpouring of emotion, questions, 'why's' to a particular though unknown and seemingly uncaring G-d.

But then poetry may well be a way of expressing,venting individual hurt and wrath.

Cornelia at 10:24 on 26 July 2005  Report this post
Yes, of course I agree that poetry is indeed very personal, but I get very frustrated with stuff that is evidently meant to be shared and which I can't understand. I feel I need a glossary, and perhaps that's because I was a Literature teacher for so many years. Of course, if I were to scheduled to teach a poet on the A Level syllabus, T.S. Eliot, for instance, I would prepare by going to the library and look for a book with footnotes. Nobody understands densely written poetry straight away. Also, there is a limit to how much personal stuff is peculiar to the individual. Mostly, I think that if the reader doesn't get the references it is down to a lack of experience/reading but that's not the case with me. So I suppose I was requesting some kind of glossary other than the very brief Blake intro, but I see now I didn't read the Blake closely enough to give me a valuable clue.

I assumed, too, that an indifferent deity was a given, so that to rail against an indifferent God seems slightly old-fashioned or well-trammelled, although not the expression of it here, which is arresting and strange, if extremely puzzling.

Thank you for your patience.

Sheila

Felmagre at 19:15 on 26 July 2005  Report this post

but I get very frustrated with stuff that is evidently meant to be shared and which I can't understand. I feel I need a glossary..


Your honesty puts me to shame as the self-same feelings ring a bell with me, though I cannot lay claim to the same credentials; though I am learning.

Cornelia at 20:05 on 26 July 2005  Report this post
My experience of modern poetry is very limited, so I will be making a point of reading some more.

I don't know I would agree that Herodotus invented narrative history, as there were Chinese historians writing long before, in particular one called Sima Qian who was writing long before Herodatus and the rise of the Roman Empire. I will need to check dates, and spellings, but China has the longest recorded history, and I have read some of his accounts which are very narrative in style - as history tends to be, I suppose.

Sheila

<Added>

Sima Qian was writing around 100BC, about 600 years before Herodotus, whom I note is Greek, not Roman. However, this is quite late in Chinese History. One might claim Confucius,(c. 300BC) except his analects were written by disciples, including Mencius. They are certainly narratives.

seanfarragher at 23:21 on 26 July 2005  Report this post
Thank you Cordelia and Sheila for your spirited discussion of allusion in my poems, or in poems that use allusion as a way of a highlight on a poem. I truly appreciate your discussion, and I too want to learn how I can create the passion, the music, the imagery and bring more readers to approximate nuances of meanings. I don't a poem means something. That is not a rule or principle. That is how my voice as a poet speaks. I write using a layer of images. Herotodus may or may not have been first, but he was as a Greek an important link between modernity and the Hellenic world. Ozone and Herotodus may seem a strange association at first. Ozone is a symbol of modern complaint, in a way a marker in the history of the atmosphere of this organic and evolving planet. The history of ozone is significant indirectly in an understanding of the modern naive manner of how we live on this planet. I use imagery someitmes to slap the reader in another slant on what I am speaking. Yes, it may seem traditional, but I am hardly traditional and that was ironically not my intention. How the poem evolves is not by perfect measures but approximate sketches and then crafting into a whole.
You may like to read some of Yeats after 1920 to start as I owe in this particular poem much to some of his poetry (not images and ideas) but the intense desire to know and warn (although I don't believe my warning will be heard) -- If I can stimulate the kind of discussion here then the poem has worked for me. Thank you again for your read and comments. I appreciate them.


To post comments you need to become a member. If you are already a member, please log in .