308 and 309

O Father, thou who knowest that man must

be lonely for awhile to be made pure,

who even, with a perfect, faithful trust,

didst leave thy Son alone, and wast still sure.

How is’t that thou canst leave, alone, us, too,

who do not with our loneliness what’s just?

We do not do what Jesus was to do

when lone, how so that we, too, earn this trust?

But, all alone, we grow new eyes to see,

and see, indeed, the righteousness of dust.

Is that why we, too, desperately must be

alone? To learn to know that kind of trust?

O Father, have we learned this lesson yet?

In this, the hell our sorr’wing hands beget?

~~~

How much I wish that I could drink a cup

of wellspring water from the very fount

wherefrom it bubbleth clean, or lap it up,

at water’s edge for days I couldn’t count,

or have its spray wash over me while I

would breathe its vapor even while I slept;

and never, ever, fear that I might die

out here, where desert sands o’er me have swept.

Oasis that thou art, give me thine eyes,

the very fountains, pure, of which I speak;

and let me rest beneath thy fountains’ vise,

and never, for another fountain, seek.

But thou art there, and I am here, too dry,

too far from the refreshment of thy eye.