How to Avoid the Divine
Author Sarah Tate
How to Avoid the Divine
Sarah Tate
Above all, love no one. You mustn’t know of the rose in the valley. Never hear wine-deepened songs or see sun through trees like fine white shards. When you come to a day of warm swollen weather, or stumble upon an ordered thing in a wild place, ivy over walls or furrows with primal seeds, flee the way you came. Put it all behind you: old folks still drawing from wells every dawn, Alpine smells (God, how clear the air), birds, all kinds, crackling in the rust-brown leaves. Or else it will face you like a warrior with sword and shield— a true anguished wonder to shred your leather-clad skin and meet you beard-to-beard. If you must do something, work hard without rest or end until you’re always numb with a nothing sort of buzz. Let seasons pass without melodious order. Let Earth spin without mythic making. Memory mustn’t sprinkle its meaning. There’s no light in the moon. The pond is not dead calm. The story is not a dream remembered at noon. The boy does not laugh how your brother used to. You must never, not once, suffer the fatigue of your existence and question if there’s more, more— throw aside all rhymes that sound like news from another world. Just sit there and wither into a modern kind of man, rich and grand, and leave the gods for another time.
Poems & Paraboles publishes work that illuminates, awakens, or opens a small window toward wonder. Some pieces are quiet. Some are bold. Some carry a moral thread, while others wander into the mysterious and ethereal.
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Sarah! Thank you for sharing your poem with us this morning. It offers thought-provoking reason to slow down, live more embodied and make room for delight.