A book as dogma

[Mopkins]

poet Les Murray





Religions are poems. They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture

into the only whole thinking: poetry.
Nothing's said till it's dreamed out in words
and nothing's true that figures in words only.

A poem, compared with an arrayed religion,
may be like a soldier's one short marriage night
to die and live by. But that is a small religion.

Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition;
like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete
with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that?

You can't pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn;
you can't poe one either. It is the same mirror:
mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,

fixed centrally, we call it a religion,
and God is the poetry caught in any religion,
caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror

that he attracted, being in the world as poetry
is in the poem, a law against its closure.
There'll always be religion around while there is poetry

or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent,
as the action of those birds - crested pigeon, rosella parrot -
who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.

this may be my favorite bit of wisdom on the persistance of poetry and paradise and purgatory, and the reason to invoke the muse and amuse said muse, marvelling at the mystery of the inherited voice of god we all seem to possess, effervescing into bursting blossom, by self-immolating sin every second, and ascending as a consecrated phoenix from the ashes of it's former incarnation, when we finally manage to squeeze our home-brewed dogma into the straight-jacket of religion, with god explored and charted, and documented, with the copyright granted to the only true church and known better to us than the backs of our hands, the palms of which we trace our future path, which we already suspect we know the direction of and have a favorable wind at our backs to reach our self-created paradises to dwell eternally in the the presence of the almighty poet of the cosmos in a recreated eden.

everything is a poem and a religion, poets are shamans and do not mistake themselves for gods or devils in their ritual mirrors, poetry is the mould everything is cast in, though you write not a thing.