Genesis

I

Against the burly air I strode

Crying the miracles of God.

And first I brought the sea to bear

Upon the dead weight of the land;

And the waves flourished at my prayer,

The rivers spawned their sand,

And where the streams were salt and full

The tough pig-headed salmon strove,

Ramming the ebb, in the tide's pull,

to reach the steady hills above.

II

The second day I stood and saw

The osprey plunge with triggered claw,

Feathering blood along the shore,

To lay the living sinew bare.

And the third day I cried: 'Beware

The soft-voiced owl, the ferret's smile,

The hawk's deliberate stoop in air,

Cold eyes, and bodies hooped in steel

Forever bent upon the kill.'

III

And I renounced, on the fourth day,

This fierce and unregenerate clay,

Building as a huge myth for man,

The watery Leviathan,

And made the long-winged albatross

Scour the ashes of the sea

Where Capricorn and Zero cross,

A brooding immortality --

Such as the charmed phoenix has

In the unwithering tree.

IV

The phoenix burns as cold as frost;

And, like a legendary ghost,

The phantom-bird goes wild and lost,

Upon a pointless ocean tossed.

So, the fifth day, I turned again

To flesh and blood and the blood's pain.

V

On the sixth day, as I rode

In haste about the works of God,

With spurs I plucked the horse's blood.

By blood, we live, the hot, and cold,

To ravage and redeem the world:

There is no bloodless myth will hold.

And by Christ's blood are men made free

Though in close shrouds their bodies lie

Under the rough pelt of the sea;

Though Earth has rolled beneath her weight

The bones that cannot bear the light.

The War Of The End Of The World - pg. 84

Worse trials still awaited them in Canudos; they must not allow fear to overcome them, the Blessed Jesus would aid those who had faith. The end of the world continued to be a subject he very often spoken of. The earth, worn out after so many centuries of giving forth plants and animals and sheltering man, would ask the Father if it might rest. God would give His consent and the acts of destruction would commence. That was what was meant by the words of the Bible: "I bring not peace, but a sword!"

Voss - pg. 336

Over the dry earth he went, with his springy, exaggerated strides, and in this strange progress, was at peace and in love with his fellows. Both sides were watching him. The aboriginals could have been trees, but the members of the expedition were so contorted by apprehension, longing, love, or disgust, they had become human again. All remembered the face of Christ that they had seen at some point in their lives, either in churches or in visions, before retreating from what they had not understood, the paradox of man in Christ, and Christ in man. All were obsessed by what could be the last scene for some of them. They could not advance farther.

The Sleepwalkers - pg. 29

The words, "the pit," "the bottomless pit," came into Joachim's mind: why did this man keep on talking of religion and the Church? But before he could gather himself together to reply Bertrand had already noticed his astonishment: "Yes, you see, Europe had already become a pretty dubious field for the Church. But Africa, on the other hand! Hundreds of millions of souls as raw material for the Faith. And you can rest assured that a baptized negro is a better Christian than twenty Europeans. If the Catholics and the Protestants want to steal a march on each other for the winning of these fanatics it's very understandable; for there's where the future of their religion lies; there will be found the future warrior of the faith who will march out one day, burning and slaying in Christ's name, against a heather Europe sunk in corruption, to set at last, amid the smoking ruins of Rome, a black Pope on the throne of Peter."

Meditations - Private Thoughts

It might seem strange that opinions of weight are found in the works of poets rather than philosophers. The reason is that poets wrote through enthusiasm and imagination; there are in us seeds of knowledge, as <> in a flint; philosophers extract them by way of reason, but poets strike them out by imagination, and then they shine more bright.

The sayings of the sages can be reduced to a very few general rules.

There is in things one active power, love, charity, harmony.The Lord has made three marvels: things out of nothingness; freewill; and the Man who is God.

How It Is - pg. 45

raise the eyes look for faces in the sky animals in the sky fall asleep and there a beautiful youth meet a beautiful youth with golden goatee clad in an alb wake up in a sweat and have met Jesus in a dream