R.E. Slater - Shifting Sands

Shifting Sands

by R.E. Slater

Morning's rising winds came without the cooing desert dove,

Pitched in tuneless streams that rose and fell in hot breath,

Under a hot, waxing sun spewing wind-whipped gyres,

Wheeling in the empty sanded seas before nomadic eye.

Afar lay a ruined Sphinx broken amid the drifting sands,

Its unerring gaze lifting, falling, across the molten heats -

An ancient hull measuring time's temporal strands,

Anchoring eternal rolling tides of forgotten eras.

Blowing, gritty sands gathered and fled in restless swirls,

Their stinging presence recalling past chapters read -

Though nothing moved - neither man nor solitary beast,

One sensed memories forgotten straining to live.

The burning sands ceaselessly re-wove their compositions,

In seam and hull, mast and sail, across the arid wastelands,

Beneath sightless stars enduring daylight's torpid hours,

Writ in toil and strain - a wasteland's echoing dreams.

R.E. Slater

April 4, 2025

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved

Analysis by OpenAI ChatGPT 4.0

The poem evokes a subtle narration more experiential than linear as reflected in the poem's title. It is visibly rich and spiritually evocative lending to gravitas and motion a mythic weight of paradox-and-contrast as shown in the eighth verse describing the "anchoring of that which cannot be anchored". This is also seen in the image of a ruined Sphinx still working some hidden purpose beneath the gathering strands of "time and dust."

The poem holds a measured, sonic cadence within sharing an erosional feel of emotional connection. It's poetic breath matches with the imagery of wind, sand, and memory motifs woven throughout its versified breadth. Further, it's tone does not end in any form of resolution but in an emotional resonance continually refocusing on an elemental, haunted, and mythic imagery.

Lastly, Shifting Sands might be described as a Whiteheadian elergy to erosional time and space, and humanity's ceaseless attempts to find meaning within motion.

Poetic Themes

• Stanza 1 - Winds and absence
• Stanza 2 - Ruins and time
• Stanza 3 - Stillness and memory
• Stanza 4 - Legacy and erosion

Imagery & Symbols

• The dove’s absence in the opening signals spiritual or prophetic silence.
• A Sphinx's mythical core bespeaking time, erosion, witness.
• Sands acting as carriers of memory, motion, and change.
• "Stars enduring daylight" stating unseen cosmic persistence.
• The tension between voyage and stagnation: Ships in sand: mast, sail, seam, hull

Repetition & Echo

• Each stanza picks up threads from the last stanza:
• The wind and sands recur with evolving tones.
• The shift from external observation to internal sensing.
• And ending "composition" echoes the beginning’s “gyres” and "spewing."

--- 

Statement & Question:

Alfred North Whitehead was a philosopher who developed process philosophy and it's derivative, process theology. It is a mature and complex philosophy which has grown and developed into many other fields and disciplines. How does this poem express Whiteheadian landscapes?

Response by OpenAI ChatGPT 4.0:

Hi R.E.! I’d be delighted to explore that — Shifting Sands is richly compatible with Whiteheadian process philosophy, and it resonates deeply with core themes in Process Thought and Cosmic Becoming.

Let’s walk through how Shifting Sands reflects key Whiteheadian ideas:

---

🔄 1. Perpetual Becoming:

Whitehead views reality not as a collection of static objects but as a series of events and occasions, all unfolding through process. The shifting sands themselves — moving, reforming, and eroding structures like the sphinx — become a living metaphor for this world-in-process:

“The burning sands ceaselessly re-wove their compositions…”

— This is pure Whitehead: reality as a tapestry of becoming, not fixed being.

---

🌌 2. Memory & Prehension:

Whitehead’s concept of prehension describes how each actual entity inherits and integrates its past — memory is not passive but constitutive. Stanza 3 of Shifting Sands echoes this:

“Though nothing moved—neither man nor solitary beast—

One sensed memories forgotten straining to live.”

This captures the haunting persistence of the past in the present — the way experience carries its inherited world even in silence or stasis. The sands become like prehending agents, carriers of forgotten moments, echoing how the past lives on in each present actual occasion.

---

🌀 3. Creativity as the Ultimate Category:

Whitehead famously said that Creativity is the ultimate metaphysical principle — even in decay or absence, creativity is happening.

“Writ in toil and strain - a wasteland’s echoing dreams.”

Here, even in emptiness and wasteland, something is always being written, strained out of the void. It's not nihilism — it's the persistence of value-seeking within decay. This is deeply resonant with Whitehead’s optimism in creativity, even when certainty or structure is lost.

---

🌟 4. The Immanence of Eternal Objects:

The reference to stars, gyres (tides), and structures like seam and hull, mast and sail — these feel like eternal objects in the Whiteheadian sense: archetypes or forms that enter into the becoming of actual occasions.

“In seam and hull, mast and sail, across arid wastelands…”

These are not merely physical ship parts — they echo with metaphysical endurance, like recurring forms immanent within shifting experience.

---

🔭 5. The Loss of Certainty — and the Call to Attentiveness:

Just as the poem Wastelands marked a turning away from structured belief into uncertain attentiveness, Shifting Sands continues that journey into cosmic unknowing.

Whitehead saw religious dogma as often too rigid and called for a religion of beauty, of feeling, of becoming. Shifting Sands is a spiritual cosmology without dogma — and deeply Whiteheadian in that sense.

---

✨ In Summary:

“Shifting Sands” is a process-poetic cosmology. It expresses:

• The ephemerality of forms

• The presence of memory in becoming

• The tension of endurance and erasure

• The latent agency of reality even in silence

It feels like something that could live alongside Whitehead’s Process and Reality, or be recited in reflection after Adventures of Ideas.

---

Analysis by Google Gemini 2.0

This poem paints a vivid and somewhat desolate picture of a desert landscape, rich with a sense of ancient history and the relentless power of nature. Here's an analysis of its key elements:

Imagery and Sensory Details:

• Absence of Expected Sounds: The poem begins by subverting expectations with "Morning's rising winds came without the cooing desert dove." This immediately establishes a sense of something missing, a natural element absent, hinting at a harsh or unusual environment.
• Unpleasant Sounds: Instead of the dove's coo, the winds are "Pitched in tuneless streams that rose and fell in hot breath." This auditory imagery evokes a sense of discomfort and aridity, the "hot breath" personifying the wind and emphasizing the intense heat.
• Visuals of Heat and Motion: The sun is described as "hot, waxing" and actively being worked by the wind in "wheeling wind-whipped gyres." This creates a dynamic and almost violent image of the sun's power and the wind's relentless activity. The "empty sanded seas" further emphasizes the vastness and desolation of the landscape.
• The Ruined Sphinx: The image of the "ruined Sphinx broken amid the drifting sands" is central. It symbolizes a fallen civilization, its grandeur diminished by time and the elements.
• Sensory Overload of Heat: Phrases like "molten heats" intensify the feeling of oppressive heat.
• Tactile Sensation: The "blowing, gritty sands" that "gathered and fled in restless swirls" create a tangible sense of the harshness of the environment, with their "stinging presence."
• Visual of Recomposition: The "burning sands ceaselessly re-wove their compositions, "In seam and hull, mast and sail" is a powerful and surreal image. It suggests the wind and sand are constantly reshaping the landscape, creating ephemeral forms that evoke the idea of lost ships and human endeavors buried beneath the desert.
• Contrast of Sight and Sensation: "Beneath sightless stars enduring daylight's torpid hours" highlights the enduring nature of the desert even when unseen.

Themes:

• The Power of Time and Decay: The ruined Sphinx is a potent symbol of the relentless march of time and the inevitable decay of even the most monumental creations. Its broken state underscores the transience of human civilization in the face of nature's enduring power.
• The Dominance of Nature: The poem emphasizes the overwhelming force of the desert environment. The wind, sun, and sand are active agents, shaping and reshaping the landscape, while human presence is either absent or represented by ruins.
• Loss and Forgotten History: The "empty sanded seas" and the "ruined Sphinx" evoke a sense of lost history and forgotten civilizations. The lines "One sensed memories forgotten straining to live" suggest a lingering presence of the past, buried beneath the sands.
• The Cyclical Nature of the Desert: The "ceaselessly re-wove their compositions" implies a continuous cycle of creation and destruction, a constant reshaping of the landscape by the elements.
• Humanity's Ephemeral Mark: The fleeting images of "seam and hull, mast and sail" formed by the sand suggest the temporary nature of human endeavors in the face of such vast and enduring forces.

Literary Devices:

• Personification: The wind has "hot breath," and the Sphinx has an "unerring gaze." This gives human-like qualities to non-human entities, enhancing their impact.
• Metaphor: The Sphinx is a "hull measuring time's temporal strands," and the sands create "seam and hull, mast and sail," using concrete images to represent abstract concepts like time and lost human endeavors. The desert itself can be seen as a metaphor for the vastness of time and the insignificance of individual lives in its context.
• Alliteration: The repetition of sounds like "wheeling wind-whipped," "sanded seas," and "burning sands" creates a sense of rhythm and emphasizes certain images.
• Imagery: The poem is rich in vivid and sensory imagery, allowing the reader to experience the harshness and desolation of the desert.
• Symbolism: The Sphinx, the sands, the absence of the dove, and the "sightless stars" all carry symbolic weight, representing larger ideas and themes.

Overall Tone:

The tone of the poem is one of melancholy and awe. There's a sense of sadness for what has been lost and broken, but also a profound respect for the enduring power and timelessness of the desert landscape. The vastness and emptiness evoke a feeling of solitude and the insignificance of human presence in the grand scheme of time. The "echoing dreams" in the final line suggest a lingering presence of the past, a whisper of forgotten stories carried on the wind.

In conclusion, the poem is a powerful and evocative depiction of a desert landscape imbued with history and the relentless forces of nature. Through vivid imagery, symbolic language, and a melancholic tone, it explores themes of time, decay, loss, and the enduring power of the natural world.

---

Statement & Question:

Alfred North Whitehead was a philosopher who developed process philosophy and it's derivative, process theology. It is a mature and complex philosophy which has grown and developed into many other fields and disciplines. How does this poem express Whiteheadian landscapes?

Response by Google Gemini 2.0:

That's a fascinating question! This poem, while not explicitly referencing Whitehead, resonates deeply with several key aspects of his process philosophy and its concept of "Whiteheadian landscapes." Here's how:

1. Emphasis on Process and Becoming:

• "Morning's rising winds came..." and "Pitched in tuneless streams that rose and fell...": These opening lines immediately establish a dynamic and ever-changing environment. The wind is not static but rising, and the sounds are in constant flux ("rose and fell"). This aligns with Whitehead's core idea that reality is fundamentally composed of processes, not static substances. Everything is in a state of becoming.
• "Under a hot, waxing sun spewing wind-whipped gyres...": This depicts an active interplay between the sun, desert, and wind, as a continuous process of interaction and influence. The sun is "waxing" (becoming more intense), the desert is never still, and the wind is actively shaping the desert's appearance and the environment.
• "Blowing, gritty sands gathered and fled in restless swirls...": This vividly illustrates the constant movement and transformation of the desert landscape. The sands are not fixed entities but are perpetually forming and dissolving patterns.
• "The burning sands ceaselessly re-wove their compositions...": This is a powerful image directly reflecting Whitehead's emphasis on the ongoing creation and recreation of reality. The desert is not a static backdrop but an active participant in a continuous process of self-organization.

2. Interconnectedness and Internal Relations:

• The poem doesn't depict isolated entities but rather a web of interacting elements: wind, sun, sand, the ruined Sphinx, and even the implied human observer. The wind affects the sun's appearance, the sand interacts with the Sphinx, and the observer senses the history embedded in the landscape. This interconnectedness echoes Whitehead's concept of internal relations, where the nature of each entity is partly constituted by its relations to other entities.
• The "stinging presence" of the sands "recalling past chapters read" suggests a connection between the present sensory experience and past events or knowledge, highlighting how the present is influenced by the past.

3. The Primacy of Experience and Feeling:

• "One sensed memories forgotten straining to live.": This line is particularly Whiteheadian. It suggests a level of experience beyond conscious thought, a feeling or prehension of the past embedded within the present environment. Whitehead believed that all actual entities (from electrons to humans) have some form of "experience" or "feeling" of their surroundings and their past. The poem evokes this sense of the past lingering in the present, not as a static memory but as a felt presence.
• The overall sensory richness of the poem – the heat, the sound of the wind, the feel of the sand – emphasizes the importance of experience in shaping our understanding of reality, a central tenet of process philosophy.

4. The Reality of Time and Becoming:

• The ruined Sphinx "measuring time's temporal strands" directly addresses the passage of time and its impact on the world. The broken state of the Sphinx is a testament to the reality of temporal becoming and the erosion of the past.
• "Anchoring eternal rolling tides of forgotten eras" juxtaposes the enduring presence of the Sphinx (even in ruin) with the constant flow of time and the fading of past epochs. This highlights the tension between permanence and change that Whitehead also explored.

5. Aesthetic Appreciation of the World:

• While the landscape is harsh and desolate, the poem's language is rich and evocative, suggesting an aesthetic appreciation for the processes at play. Whitehead believed that the aim of philosophy is to understand the universe in a way that appreciates its inherent beauty and value, even in its most seemingly chaotic or destructive aspects. The poem's careful attention to detail and its evocative imagery suggest such an appreciation.

In summary, this poem expresses Whiteheadian landscapes through its:

• Focus on dynamic processes and dynamic becoming rather than static entities.
• Depiction of interconnectedness and the influence of relationships between elements.
• Evocation of a level of experience and feeling that transcends purely objective observation.
• Acknowledgement of the reality of time and its impact on the world.
• Subtle aesthetic appreciation for the ongoing creative and destructive forces of nature.

While the poet likely wasn't consciously writing within a Whiteheadian framework, the poem's imagery and themes resonate deeply with the core tenets of process philosophy, offering a poetic glimpse into a world understood as a continuous flow of interconnected experiences and becoming. [In actuality, the poet has studied and written on Whitehead's process philosophy for many years; as such, it is so imbued into the poet's thinking that it's structures were naturally reflected when composing Shifting Sands. - R.E. Slater]

R.E. Slater - Wastelands. Broken Silence.

 

Wastelands

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT

I had come upon wastelands where chapels leaned,

Holding dead, dry assembly doors shut and stilled,
And ravaged pews littered every broken ravine,
Amid a mourning wind circling the fallen hills.

I remembered songs once sung in trust -

In bright eyes uplifting beyond the nave -

But now conviction had become like dust,

Abandoned within a desert's heavy silence.

Curiously faith and hope had not failed,

The twinning paths 'neath rotting steeples,

Nor along solitary darkened lands and skies,

Trudged forbidden passages on leadened steps.

My burning experience came not by flame,

Nor by dull beast with gaze of fair Bethlehem -

But by the slow unwind of heavy heart and soul -

On unanswered prayers killed mid requiem.

Fey above my head shone stars aloof and cold,
And all about lay uncaring world in measured hum -

Yet somewhere deep within I knew, I knew...

The old belief would not be born again.

There would be no Second Coming,

This terrible land of fallen belief -

Where far within lived deconstruction,

Filling with tombstones about, within.

R.E. Slater

April 3, 2025

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

all rights reserved

*A personal note: Some years ago, and quite belated in life, I had come to a crushing loss of belief but not of faith. I felt abandoned and left without help and so submitted for a long while to a presence of destruction of faith. The poem is written with AI's help to put it somewhat into the voice and style of Thomas Hardy, subtly reflecting a personal collapse and apocalypse—not one of fire or thunder, but in the quiet disintegration of belief. Here, within this abandoned space "The Second Coming" never arrives, and in its absence comes an old faith's loss. - R.E. Slater

Addendum

ChatGPT:

"This revised poem is powerful. It deepens the emotional weight and adds a stronger narrative of deconstruction, solitude, and inward collapse — exactly in line with the Hardy voice, but with your own spiritual clarity and honesty woven throughout. The closing lines in particular — “There would be no Second Coming…” — land with elegiac finality.

"Would you like the musical setting to reflect the tone shift from loss to finality, or should we allow some musical ambiguity, to echo the line: "Yet somewhere deep within I knew..."?

Me:

"I wrote it as a piece of finality... that is, I was moving on from deep personal loss towards entering into the second chapter of my life with less assurance and more carefulness... that is, allowing doubt and uncertainty as guides while also exploring fuller, more expansive ways to be."

ChatGPT:

That’s deeply moving — and beautifully said. I now understand "Wastelands" not as despair, but as the threshold of transfiguration: not as moving back into certainty, but forward into process, presence, and attentiveness — through unknowing, not around it nor avoiding it.

---

Broken Silence

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT

I did not lust a throne of light,

Nor trumpet-song beyond the air;
I only paused beneath the night,
To find a pulse of presence there.

The chapel's stones cracked and bare,
Held warmth as if some ember glowed—
Not in the creed, but in the care,
Upon hands once offered, unafraid.

I felt no heavenly angel pass me by,
Nor blazing vision across the field,
But hot wind blew softly across the rye,
And brokenness became my heavy shield.

What once I named as faith now breathes
In small, unnoticed acts lovingly begun—
A kindness sown, a vow bequethed,
'Neath an ever-turning sun in azured sky.

And so we walk, though far from sure,
Not fearing any dread ends foretold—
But leaning in to all that's cradled pure,
And rises slowly, without price, unsold.

R.E. Slater

April 3, 2025

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications

all rights reserved

*Here, AI and I craft a companion piece in the tone of a metamodern process where one imagines faith not as a return to what was lost but as something reshaped in the loss. Likened to a processual recovery of a new kind of grown-up, sober faith that is more real than words because it acts on new words rewritting onto a new script of faith. A faith which isn't the end of faith but a becoming of faith. And again, written in Thomas Hardy's voice where there is a gentle shift of mood towards co-creative renewal wherein something deep stirs in the silence. Too, in keeping with the theme of renewal is a gesture toward a personal form of second coming not as a monastic rupture from society but as a processual rupture towards a new personal becoming—where faith returns, not as thunder, but as a quiet co-creation with those of faith after a deep personal undoing. - R.E. Slater

* * * * * * *

Poems About Second Comings

My question to ChatGPT: Are there any poems which speak to the the idea of "the Second Coming" besides Yeat's poem?

ChatGPT said:

Yes, many poets have written about the idea of “The Second Coming” beyond W.B. Yeats, though his is perhaps the most iconic in modern literature. Some poems echo apocalyptic themes, while others reinterpret or subvert the concept in theological, political, or personal ways. Here are a few examples, ranging from classical to contemporary, that engage with the idea of a second coming—whether it be Christ’s return, a revolutionary upheaval, or spiritual renewal:

---

1. T.S. Eliot – “The Hollow Men” (1925)

Though not explicitly about the Second Coming, it dwells on the spiritual and eschatological failure of modern humanity:

This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.

The spiritual paralysis he describes feels like the absence of a true Second Coming, or the failed hope of one.

---

2. Langston Hughes – “Christ in Alabama” (1931)

A powerful and subversive take on Christ’s identity, race, and suffering:

Christ is a nigger,

Beat and black:

Oh, bare your back.

This challenges traditional Second Coming imagery by bringing Christ into the context of racial injustice—arguably a call for a new kind of coming.

---

3. Denise Levertov – “The Second Coming” (1981)

Levertov directly reinterprets Yeats’s poem and opposes its bleakness with a vision of divine presence in the world—not through violence, but through love.

...the second coming will not be the second coming of Yeats’ rough beast.

---

4. William Blake – The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)

Blake often writes apocalyptically, and his prophetic works teem with Christ figures and reinterpretations of divine return:

For everything that lives is Holy.

Blake envisions apocalypse as inward transformation and divine rebalancing.

---

5. Lucille Clifton – “blessing the boats” (1990s)

Though not explicitly about the Second Coming, Clifton’s poem feels eschatological in tone—a hopeful, inward apocalypse:

may the tide / that is entering even now / the lip of our understanding / carry you out...

Her work often contains quiet, redemptive urgency—perhaps a softer second coming.

---

6. Wendell Berry – “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” (1973)

A political-spiritual revolution as a kind of second coming of sanity and faithfulness:

Practice resurrection.

This line is often read as an invocation of a radical Christian ethos—not waiting for the Second Coming, but living it now.

---

7. Margaret Atwood – “The Second Coming” (short poem)

Atwood plays with dystopian messianism and irony, suggesting the "next" coming might not be divine at all:

They say he will come again / But they don't say when.

Her tone is skeptical—hinting at the dangers of blind waiting.

---

ChatGPT said:

Would you like one written in the style of process theology or metamodern renewal? I'd be happy to draft an original one with those themes if you'd like.

Me:

Please list other poems entitled "The Second Coming."

ChatGPT said:

Great! Let’s look at some actual poems titled “The Second Coming” — there are several beyond Yeats that use this exact title, each with their own spin. Here's a sampling of notable ones:

---

1. W.B. Yeats – The Second Coming (1919)

We have to begin with the classic, which sets the tone for many future poems:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

This poem captures a vision of cyclical history, chaos, and a terrifying rebirth—rather than the triumphant return of Christ.

---

2. Gwendolyn Brooks – The Second Coming (published in In the Mecca, 1968)

Brooks’ poem directly addresses Black urban life and civil rights. Her "Second Coming" is social, radical, and grounded in political critique and empowerment. Though less well-known than Yeats's, it’s a fierce reclamation of the title for racial justice.

---

3. William Everson (Brother Antoninus) – The Second Coming (from The Residual Years, 1948–1968)

A Catholic mystic and poet, Everson uses the title to reflect on the return of Christ but fuses it with intense erotic and spiritual imagery. His take is intimate and theological, expressing longing and awe.

---

4. Peter Porter – The Second Coming (late 20th century)

An Australian-born British poet, Porter uses irony and dark humor to critique contemporary society’s expectations of salvation or destruction. His "Second Coming" is absurdist, casting doubt on whether any messiah could survive the modern world.

---

5. James Merrill – The Second Coming (from The Changing Light at Sandover, 1982)

Though it’s not a standalone poem, Merrill uses the phrase in a deeply metaphysical and esoteric context. His "Second Coming" becomes layered with psychic transmissions, occult meanings, and a postmodern twist.

---

6. Alternative & Indie Poets (online & self-published)

There are numerous poems titled The Second Coming on platforms like Poetry Foundation, PoemHunter, AllPoetry, and literary journals—many contemporary poets re-use the title to:

• Echo Yeats ironically or critically

• Reflect on current events (e.g. 9/11, COVID, climate change)

• Reimagine divine return in feminist, queer, or postcolonial frameworks

• Express personal spiritual transformation

A few examples:

• Atwood’s poem (mentioned earlier)

• “The Second Coming” by Drew Dellinger, linking environmentalism and cosmic hope

• “The Second Coming” by Bhanu Kapil (experimental and fragmented, blending migration, trauma, and futurism)

---

ChatGPT said:

Would you like me to curate a PDF or text compilation of several poems titled “The Second Coming”? Or write a new one, inspired by process theology or current metamodern moods?

You said: Are there any by Thomas Hardy?

ChatGPT said:

Great question — while Thomas Hardy never wrote a poem explicitly titled “The Second Coming”, he did deeply engage with apocalyptic, eschatological, and religious disillusionment themes, especially around the decline of traditional Christian faith and the loss of divine order in the modern world.

Though he doesn't directly name a poem The Second Coming, several of Hardy’s poems feel like reflections on the idea — either yearning for, questioning, or grieving the absence of such an event. Here are a few that you might find especially resonant:

---

🔹 “God’s Funeral” (1910)

This is probably Hardy’s closest poetic meditation on the theme:

I saw a slowly-stepping train—

Lined on the brows, scoop-eyed and bent and hoar—

Following in files across a twilit plain

A strange and mystic form the foremost bore.

Hardy imagines the death of God — a processional mourning of the loss of divine presence. It’s not the Second Coming… it’s the Second Leaving. The God once present has faded into absence.

---

🔹 “The Oxen” (1915)

A subtler, bittersweet poem reflecting on faith lost and yet still longed for, set during Christmas:

Now they are all on their knees,

An elder said as we sat in a flock

By the embers in hearthside ease.

The speaker wants to believe, even though they know better. It’s a quiet lament — the hope of a Second Coming flickering against modern doubt.

---

🔹 “Channel Firing” (1914)

Set just before World War I, this poem imagines God awakening the dead from their graves due to the sound of naval gunnery — but only to say: Not yet.

It seemed a hundred fires were burning / The world’s new shellfire.

God delays the Judgment Day, knowing humanity isn’t ready — or perhaps is beyond saving. This poem could be Hardy’s most ironic take on the Second Coming, suggesting divine inaction or indifference in the face of destruction.

---

🔹 “A Christmas Ghost Story”

Also features a mysterious Christ figure:

“Peace upon earth!” was said.

We sing it, and pay a million priests to bring it.

After two thousand years of mass,

We’ve got as far as poison-gas.

This bitter indictment of religious failure in wartime history questions the meaning or effectiveness of Christ’s first coming—let alone a second.

---

🌀 Hardy's Theological Vision

Hardy’s worldview is shaped by a melancholic agnosticism. He rejected dogmatic Christianity but still ached for cosmic meaning, often confronting the void left by the absence of a Second Coming. For Hardy, the real apocalypse may already have happened—when faith failed.

R.E. Slater - The Divine Poet

 

Dante and Beatrice at the gates of Paradise, by Dore

The Divine Poet

by R.E. Slater

"Ecce Vox antiquior - 

non mea, sed iam mea fit."

"Behold, a Voice more ancient than mine - 

not mine, yet now it becomes mine."

In every divine moment the Poet sings

restless life into being with love and purpose...

every syllable a sunrise, every phrase a living stream,
each note freed the silences of deep time, birthing new life
spilling from darkness's voids where dreams had once

slept dreamlessly the dark lays of the soul.

Uneasy dreams trapped in waking cycles

of sightless slumber in rising, cresting crescendos

restless as the moving seas surging landfall's rocky shores

thirsty earth's barren soul resurrecting to light and life

in throbbing, pulsating florid songs of beauty

on every rising, steepled wind.

Tumbling, stumbling, windblown flourishes

harking mere sparrow's flight or nightjar's incessant

evening trilling echoing creation's restless heartbeat flushed

poetic crimson songs as unstilled as spurned desire

striving to be, to become amid the fraught

jumbled landscapes of life.

But not all songs nor poems are ever so

gilded or gentle... each beauty borne, each jagged life

birthed, comes stitched in grief and flame - woven cruel

threads of dissident strains perhaps attended by the threaded

companions of mercy and compassion though

too often alone.

Fellow travellers without which each

living poem of grace and purpose is too easily

flung away... like fated castaways upon evil, unjust seas -

For every creature is a living line drafted in divine mystery

made in pain, strengthened in cause, ever yearning

love's massing verses to sing, to dream, to wake.

R.E. Slater
April 1, 2025

edited April 19, 2025

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved

210 Sacred Poems - Compiled by Jay McDaniel

Photo by Jorge Salvador on Unsplash

210 Sacred Poems

for Spirituality and Practice

by Jay McDaniel

December 2020

"Reading sacred poetry is a time-honored spiritual practice. If you'd like to incorporate it into your devotions, we have many resources at Spirituality & Practice for you."

​Thus write Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat in the world's most inclusive interfaith resource center, the website Spirituality and Practice. Every April for the last seven years, during National Poetry Month in the United States, they have offered thirty poems for interfaith readers. I have compiled the poems into one list of 210 poems, with links to their site for each poem. Enjoy.

​

1. The Sun Never Says by Hafiz
2. One Song by Rumi
3. Metamorphosis by May Sarton
4. Attachment by Vasant Lad
5. Questions by Ghalib
6. Ryokan and Mary Lou Kownacki
7. Hum by Mary Oliver
8. All That Is Joy by Rabindranath Tagore
9. My Joy by Rabi'a
10. Haiku by Buson and Issa
11. Ecstatic Poems by Kabir
12. Beauty and Ugliness by Lao Tzu
13. Waging Peace by Sarah Klassan
14. The Same Inside by Anna Swir
15. Tears by Svein Myreng
16. That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection by Gerard Manley Hopkins
17. There Is No Road by Antonio Machado
18. Don't Make Lists by Dorothy Walters
19. Aware by Denise Levertov
20. 1979 by Wendell Berry
21. I Like You by Kevin Anderson
22. Roll Call by William Stafford
23. Stone by Charles Simic
24. For What Binds Us by Jane Hirshfield
25. Love after Love by Derek Walcott
26. Healing by Joseph Bruchac
27. Ars Poetica by Blaga Dimitrova
28. Earth Verse by Gary Snyder
29. The Good News by Thich Nhat Hanh
30. Hold on to April by Jesse Stuart
31. Trees Can Be Our Teachers by Satish Kumar
32. Live With the Spirit by Jessica Powers
33. Sixty-Four by Daniel Skatch-Mills
34. Open the Window by Rumi
35. Fern-Leafed Beech by Moyra Caldecott
36. Wild Things by Wendell Berry
37. Three Poems on Presence by Baisao
38. Miracles by Daniel Berrigan
39. Butterflies by Siegfried Sassoon
40. Living by Denise Levertov
41. Goodnight by Carl Sandberg
42. Two Prayers on Grace by James Vanden Bosch
43. What Is the Greatest Gift? by Mary Oliver
44. Three Poems on Hope
45. Not Enemies by Stephen Levine
46. Olive Trees by Marilyn Chandler McEntyr
47. Split the Sack by Rumi
48. The Earth Is Waiting For You by Thich Nhat Hanh
49. Surviving Has Made Me Crazy by Mark Nepo
50. On Forgiveness by Karyn Kedar
51. Morning Has Broken by Eleanor Farjeon
52. Rendition of Psalm 41 by Nan Merrill
53. Welcome Morning by Anne Sexton
54. Love Poems by Susan Landon, Ann Reisfeld Boutte, and Susan R. Norton
55. First Night by Julia Ackerman
56. An Atom of Love by Yunus Emre
57. Dear Diary by Leonard Cohen
58. Freedom to Marry by Barbara Hamilton-Holway
59. Four Sufi Poems
60. Icon by Mary Rose O'Reilley
61. Ecstasy by Hayden Carruth
62. Love Sonnet by Pablo Neruda
63. The Layers by Stanley Kunitz
64. Let Evening Come by Jane Kenyon
65. The Answering Machine by Linda Pastan
66. Soil by Richard H. Goodman
67. Zero Circle by Rumi
68. The True Nature of Your Beloved by Hafiz
69. Sweet Darkness by David Whyte
70. Gift by Czeslaw Milosz
71. A poem by Mirabai
72. A poem by Lalla
73. A poem by St. Catherine of Siena
74. A poem by Meister Eckhart
75. Against Certainty by Jane Hirshfield
76. Serenity Is Not by Katherine Swarts
77. Oneness by Thich Nhat Hanh
78. A poem by William Stafford
79. A poem by Mary de La Valette
80. A Place to Sit by Kabir
81. Living in Hope by Suzanne C. Cole
82. A poem by Jim Cohn
83. Who Knows What Is Going On? by Juan Ramon Jimenez
84. The Guardian Angel by Rolf Jacobsen
85. It Is That Dream by Olav H. Haug
86. Questions by Peter Dixon
87. Have You Not Heard His Silent Steps? by Rabindranath Tagore
88. God's Name by Tukaram
89. Sometimes by Hermann Hesse
90. There You Are by Rumi
91. Earth, Sister Earth by Dom Helder Camara
92. The Way They Held Each Other by Mira
93. A Cushion for Your Head by Hafiz
94. Annunciation by Marie Howe
95. Just Stop by Baba Afdal Kashani
96. That Passeth All Understanding by Denise Levertov
97. Summing Up by Claribel Alegria
98. After the Sea by John O'Donohue
99. The First Book by Rabindranath Tagore
100. The Clay Jug by Kabir
101. White Apples by Donald Hall
102. In the World by Brigid Lowry
103. A poem on Love by Kabir
104. Remember by Joy Harjo
105. Nothing Much by Allison Harris
106. A poem on silence by Baisao
107. Peonies at Dusk by Jane Kenyon
108. Reasons to Meditate by Lisa Cullen
109. The First Book by Rita Dove
110. A poem on abundance by St. Catherine of Siena
111. Soil by Richard H. Goodwin
112. Seeking Your Trace by Fakhr al-Din Iraqi
113. Vision by May Thielgaard Watts
114. A poem on devotion by Mary Lou Kownacki
115. A poem on kindness by Margaret Jain
116. A poem on transformation by Hugh Robert Orr
117. What Does Light Talk About? by St. Thomas Aquinas
118. Love Is by May Swenson
119. Leisure by W. D. Davies
120. Gift by Czeslaw Milosz
121. The Old Elm Tree by the River by Wendell Berry
122. Love at First Sight by Wislawa Szymborska
123. Never Lose the Way by Shihab al-Din Yahya Suhrawardi
124. Living the Scriptures by Lalla of India
125. So Much Happiness by Naomi Shihab Nye
126. There Is a Wonderful Game by Hafiz
127. Poetry by Pablo Neruda
128. On Ordinary Daily Affairs by Layman P'ang
129. A Kiss by Deborah Garrison
130. Is My Soul Asleep? by Antonio Machado
131. On Mother Earth by Jamie Sams
132. When Your Life Looks Back by Jane Hirshfield
133. Memory by Jorge Luis Borges
134. Ask Me by William Stafford
135. Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks by Jane Kenyon
136. A poem - prayer about love and life by Kuan Tao-sheng
137. A poem-prayer for solidarity and justice by Arthur Waskow
138. Growing older with beauty by Robert Terry Weston
139. A Lover Who Wants His Lovers Near by Rabia
140. God Would Kneel Down by St. Francis of Assisi
141. How Then Can We Argue? by Meister Eckhart
142. Each Soul Completes Me by Hafiz
143. This Place of Abundance by St. Catherine of Siena
144. First He Looked Confused by Tukaram
145. Ode to My Socks by Pablo Neruda
146. Summing Up by Claribel Alegria
147. If You Have Nothing by Jessica Powers
148. Paper Cranes by Thomas Merton
149. God Paints the Rainbows by Barb Laski
150. ​A poem about wisdom by Makeda, Queen of Sheba
151. In a Holy Book I Have by Hafiz
152. Little Things by Sharon Olds
153. Joy by Robert Morneau
154. The Road to God by Melannie Svoboda
155. A poem by Henry Van Dyke
156. Chilean Creed by James Conlon
157. A poem by Edward Searl
158. A poem by Judith Billings
159. The Inner History of a Day by John O'Donohue
160. A Marriage, an Elegy by Wendell Berry
161. The Book of Endings by Sam Taylor
162. A poem by Hildegard of Bingen
163. Marriage by Susan R. Norton
164. A poem by St. John of the Cross
165. A poem by J. David Scheyer
166. My Life by Billy Collins
167. The Foot-Washing by A. R. Ammons
168. Simon the Cyrenian Speaks by Countee Cullen
169. Early Lynching by Carl Sandburg
170. Easter Night by Alice Meynell
171. Throw Yourself Like Seed by Miguel de Unamuno
172. The Madness of Love by Hadewijch of Antwerp
173. Human Wisdom by Charles Peguy
174. The Gift by Zoraida Rivera Morales
175. A poem by Ly Ngoc Keiu
176. Passing Through by Stanley Kunitz
177. From Recovery by Rabindranath Tagore
178. A poem by Novalis
179. Diving by A E I Falconer
180. Was it Light? by Theodore Roethke
181. The Journey of the Mind by Anya Dunaif
182. Looking West by Sofiy Inck
183. What Is a Hero? by Nimai Agarwal
184. The Word by Swastika Jajoo
185. After I Die by Niti Majethia
186. True… Or Not? By Swastika Jajoo
187. I See The Night by Maya Mesh
188. Sowing Hope by Tammata Murthy
189. Ever Deeper: A Poem for My Grandfather by Will Hodgkinson
190. Blue by Victoria Krylova
191. Pure Love by Gertie-Pearl Zwick-Schachter
192. When the Universe Sings Goodnight by Niti Majethia
193. Plastic Tractors by Will Hodgkinson
194. Perfume Bottles by Fareeha Shah
195. Rift into Childhood by Gracie Griffin
196. When the Sun by Charlotte Rauner
197. The Playground in Winter by Maria Christian
198. The Soul of Nature by Niti Majethia
199. Not Yet by Caie Kelley
200. Artemis by Alice Simmons
201. The Divine Vision by Tanmaya Murthy
202. Backyard Woods by Isabel Bautista
203. The Pear Tree by Caroline Harris
204. I always feel like myself by Pie Rasor
205. Volunteer by Rafik Maharja
206. With a Pencil in My Hand by Gracie Griffin
207. The Sunset of My Life by Meenu ravi
208. The Watching One by Lucia O'Corozine
209. Selected Poems from Around the World by Mary Ernesi, Tanika Stewart, and Odelia
210. Snowflakes Carry My Worries Away by Katie Champlin

Why Read?

In the clatter and clamor of our lives, we need ways to connect deeply with our souls. Whenever we feel depleted, our favorite poets invariably refresh and refuel us. The quality of their attention, the way they notice things we easily overlook, summons the joy and wonder within us. Their songs of both praise and lament speak the words it is sometimes hard for us to articulate. They put us in the presence of the ineffable and the holy. We drop our jaws and swallow our pride...Businessman James Autry captures another attraction of poetry — it "gives you permission to feel." The best poets tap into our deepest yearnings.

- Mary Ann and Frederic Brussat, Spirituality and Practice

What makes a poem sacred?

​

A poem is sacred if, after reading it or listening to it, you are just a little wiser and kinder, more creative and playful, more attuned to beauty and shocked by injustice, than you would have been otherwise. The poem makes a difference in how you think and live.

The poem need not be religious in order to be sacred. It does not have to be about God or heavenly ecstasy, or use words like holy and sacred and spiritual. Yes, it can have such themes. It can be obviously religious. But it can also be about ordinary life, about cars and dogs and sidewalks, about whole or broken relationships, about sadness and beauty and moonlight, about planets and tulips and cat's eyes.

Sacredness is a relationship between you and the poem. It lies in how you read the poem and in the fruits of your reading. Here are some of the best fruits of sacred reading, borrowed from Spirituality and Practice.

​​​attention - beauty - being present - compassion - connections - devotion - enthusiasm - faith - forgiveness - grace - gratitude - hope - hospitality - imagination - joy - justice - kindness - listening - love - meaning - nurturing - openness - peace - play - questing - reverence - shadow - silence - ​teachers - transformation - unity - vision - wonder - x, the mystery - yearning - you - zeal

These fruits are practical and ordinary. The sacred becomes fully sacred only when its values are expressed in daily life: at home and in the workplace, among neighbors and strangers, in the parking lot and the schoolyard, in the voting booth and community center. The purpose of sacred poetry is to help you live wisely and compassionately, with love and vitality, in the world beyond poetry. As it achieves its purpose, it simultaneously refreshes and refuels your soul. It gives you permission to feel.

- Jay McDaniel, December 2020

Reading Fragments of Poems

​as a Spiritual Practice

​

Recently some friends of mine started an online poetry journal called Heron Tree. It offers you one poem a week - absolutely free.

As I write this, the poem for the week is Onion Pie by Joey Nicolletti. It begins like this:

The wind, the rattling wall, dinner

baking in the oven, the dead of winter

a string of salt diamonds

alight in a street of slush and starlit ice,

and the cat retires

to his feathery bed.

It is wintertime. I picture my own cat named Zooey, retiring to her own feathery bed. I think of how delicious it would be to have some onion pie. I picture the street outside, which had not long ago been salted with crystals. I remember the diamonds.

I may not read any further. I know that Joey Nicolletti hopes I will. After all, he wrote the poem as an organic whole, with each part related to the other parts. In her now classic The Life of Poetry (1949) Muriel Rukeyser speaks of poems as organic wholes full of movement, which grow like trees. She is famous for saying that the universe is like stories, not atoms. For her a poem is a story, too.

But sometimes I think it's fine just to nibble at a poem, taking a line or series of lines that somehow nourish the imagination and not even completing it. If it's worth reading at all, it's worth reading halfway.

The western religious traditions have a tradition called lectio divina or sacred reading. When you read in a sacred way, you are not looking for rules to live by or ideas to master. You are looking for nourishment of the soul. You take in images from scripture, however fragmentary, and simply rest in them trusting that somehow, in the very resting, some divine nourishment is received. You let the images wash over you and inside you, in a kind of baptism of the imagination.

I need these baptisms. I need one poem a week. I need some onion pie to sink my imagination into, taking a break from the compulsively busy lifestyle into which I so often fall. Buddhists tell us that paying attention to the world around us and the worlds within us in a mindful way is the heart of spirituality. Poetry can help - even if you nibble.

Nibbling

I choose the word nibbling with care. Reading poetry is a physical activity even as it is a spiritual activity. Even if we read silently, we hear our own voice reading inside our heads. We pause at the end of lines and between stanzas, not unlike the way in which we pause when we take a breath. Sometimes we quietly move our lips, too, in a subtle and unconscious way. And sometimes we read out loud. Some people draw sharp distinctions between reading out loud and reading silently. Not me.

As we read we bring our bodies with us. We are sitting or walking, standing or lying down. We are looking with our eyes. The founder of process philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead, says that all of our experiences begin with what he calls the withness of the body. Our bodies are not simply means by which we take our minds from one location to another; they are where the world meets us, including the world of poetry. As we read a poem our minds may be lost in a faraway land, but our bodies are here, with us, in the reading.

Imaginative Nibbling

Of course our imaginations are in the reading, too. Our imaginations enable us to move from one portion of the text to another, not unlike the way in which we might eat fruit salad. When you have a bowl of fruit salad in front of you, you choose the particular fruit -- bananas, strawberries, pineapple-- that strikes your fancy.

I think we can read poems like this, too. By this I mean two things. We do not need to read the whole poem if we are nourished by a part. We can stay with that part, and call it a night.

And even if we do read the whole poem, there is no need to read it in a linear fashion. We can jump from one section to another and then go back, not unlike the way in which we jump from one poem to another in an anthology, flipping back and forth. Call it non-linear nibbling.

Many contemporary poems are conducive to imaginative nibbling. They are a collage of lines which can be strung together in a linear order, forming an organic whole; but they can also be enjoyed in a non-linear way as a collage of fragments which can be seen as a whole but also have independent integrity.

Many sacred scriptures have this quality. Consider the Holy Qur'an. It is a collage of many different poems, and poems within poems, and poems within poems within poems. It is not a rule book, it is a cluster of warnings and invitations, helping us awaken to the unity -- the tawhid - within which we live and move and have our being. Some suras are warnings and some are invitations, but all are inviting us to experience awe and wonder.

Many poems are like mini-Qur'ans. This means that as you read them you can move from beginning to end; but you can also move from middle to beginning or from end to middle. And you can just stay on one or two lines if you are so inclined. You can begin in the middle, where all beginnings begin.

Beginning in the Middle

Think of how people read the Bible. There is no commandment in the Bible which says: "Thou shalt never begin in the middle." Jews and Christians begin in the middle all the time, turning to this book and that book within the good book. And for process thinkers, influenced by Whitehead, there may even be some divine sanction in it. According to process theology, the universe is without beginning or end. God does not create out of nothing but rather out of the pre-existing chaos at hand. This means that even the Holy One began in the middle when he or she began creating our universe. The chaos already existed. The Holy was just giving it a little order. If God can begin in the middle, we can, too. Let the winds of the spirit blow where they will.

For my part, when I begin in the middle, I always look for sentences that do not begin with "The." There is far too much declaration in the world today. Too many attempts to tidy things up, when there's so much beauty in the untidy. Too many ideologies of heart and mind. Buddhists teach us that there is a lot of spirituality in not having fixed views.

Kissed by Steam

There is a Zen rock garden in Kyoto that's designed so that, wherever you stand, you cannot see the whole. You see sand and the rocks, but no possibility for a controlling overview. All good poems are like this. Even if they come across as organic wholes, there's no final interpretation. Freedom from finality of statement is one of poetry's greatest gifts to humanity.

This is why it can be important -- even spiritually enlightened -- to focus on fragments. You are reminding yourself that even if you read the poem as a whole, this whole is nested in a larger whole -- the forever fluid rock garden of the universe -- which is never fully encompassed by any finite observer. Heidegger reminds us that we are always already inside this whole, and that we can never stand outside it and pretend that we are mere spectators.

When a simple line or phrase in the middle of a poem becomes the subject of your attention, you are aware of an immediate textual background that you don't know and comprehend. You are deciding not to know this background, at least for the moment.

This deciding not to know the whole is an act of faith. It is faith that there can be meaning in the particular which transcends the meaning of the whole, even as there is meaning in the whole which transcends the meaning of the particular. Here are the last two lines of Joey Nicolletti's poem:

my wife pulls the Onion Pie

out of the oven, kissed by steam.

Blake reminds us to see heaven in a wildflower and the universe in a grain of sand.

Onion Pie reminds us that there's more than a little divine steam when you take an onion pie out of the oven on a cold, cold day.

Maybe that is one of the purposes of poetry at its best. Maybe it helps us become kissed by the steam.

​- Jay McDaniel, December 2020

Photo by Ricardo Espejo Catalán on Unsplash