From Four Quartets
by T.S. Eliot
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love for the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
And I Said To My Soul, Be Loud
by Christian Wiman
Madden me back to an afternoon
I carry in me
not like a wound
but like a will against a wound
Give me again enough man
to be the child
choosing my own annihilations
To make of this severed limb
a wand to conjure
a weapon to shatter
dark matter of the dirt daubers' nests
galaxies of glass
Whacking glints
bash-dancing on the cellar's fire
I am the sound the sun would make
if the sun could make a sound
and the gasp of rot
stabbed from the compost's lumpen living death
is me
O my life my war in a jar
I shake you and shake you
and may the best ant win
For I am come a whirlwind of wasted things
and will ride this tantrum back to God
until my fixed self, my fluorescent self
my grief-nibbling, unbewildered, wall-to-wall self
withers in me like a salted slug
Note: "And I Said To My Soul," by Christian Wiman, from Every Riven Thing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC).
