Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the land.
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the clean of heart,
for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.
—Matthew 5:1-12a

Make me meek, that you may bless me 
with a portion in the land.
I am arrogant—oh, best me:
Make me bow when I would stand.
Yet, O Lord, I mourn already;
say my tears have filled your hand.

Make me poor, in wealth, in spirit,
that your kingdom may be mine.
Rich, I am too full to carry
what you give, sev’n times refined,
and this grief that I am bearing
fills my days before, behind.

Make me hunger for your mercy;
make me thirst for righteousness.
I have tasted judgment’s burning,
vengeance’ wine drunk in excess,
yet these tears increased my thirsting,
yearning for the bread you bless.

Let my arrogance be done for:
Make me humble; make me meek.
Give me thirst and give me hunger
for yourself: Be all I seek.
Come, O Lord, and be my comfort:
Let me break the bread of peace.

Egyptian professional mourners in a sorrowful gesture of mourning. – Alma E..”Reader’s Digest: Mysteries of the Bible: The Enduring Question of the Scriptures”.Pleasantville, New York/Montreal.The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc.1988.ISBN: 0-89577-293-0Author, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20137834

The skirling of the killdeer
and clatter of its wings
as I pass by the field here
alarms the hidden things.

My feet are on the pathway
and will not leave its stone;
what cringes here I can’t say.
I do not walk alone.

The starlings rise and gather
along the power line
while others keep to shadow,
well out of sight and mind.

From hence will I go homeward
to shelter in my turn
alike from owl and snowstorm
and cold whose touch can burn,

for like the night descending
comes fear on raven wings.
I’ll run to earth and rest there
with all the hidden things.

In flight, By CheepShot – Kildeer, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37127592

Primordial chaos coaxed into a pattern
as light and dark become the day and night:
This world is formed of undivided matter,
then separated, spectrumed out of white.
The valleys rise; the mountains take their height;
and time begins to know before and after.

The dry land lifts with ocean as its border—
yet mountains rise in deep abyssal shade.
The soil original maintains its order
except where springs and streams the heights invade
or weaken cliffsides ‘til they shrug, unmade,
and humankind cries out to God its warder.

There is no answer: Word sinks down to silence,
and we who long for life are drowned in death.
The only certainties are rot and violence,
though, diligent, we search the length and breadth
of earth and sea for ways to keep our breath—
in vain between the flood and desert dryness.

And yet the silent Word forever spoken
is echoing in every night and day.
All times may shattered be, all patterns broken:
It lets itself be shaken on the sway
of tempests and of earthquakes in their play.
Creation groans and something new is woken.

Between the cause and the effect is mercy;
between the water and the land is mud.
Divinity into our death is bursting
to share our desert bone and tempest blood,
and God himself is lost beneath the flood
and knows our fear of it, and yet our thirsting.

He swallows death, by death our life increasing;
our time he pierces with eternity
and takes our shattered fragments, mending, piecing.
He gathers us, the dry land, and the sea
all in himself, yet each itself shall be,
and in his endless day go on unceasing.

Separation of Light from Darkness. Sistine Chapel, fresco Michelangelo – Web Gallery of Art[1], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1551126

Based on Psalm 137:

How can we sing of our homeland
here on an alien shore,
serving the time of our sojourn?
Shall we see Eden no more?

There is a table of plenty;
chalice and plate overflow
filling the hands of the empty,
blessing the friend and the foe.

There is a music of comfort
drawing forth all of our tears.
God knows the stars and their number:
God sees us weeping the years.

All of our sorrows recording,
carving them into his hands,
all we have wept he’s transforming:
There will be joy in the land.

But how can we sing of such wonders
here where the thorns are so sharp?
Deep is the shade we lie under:
Here let us hang up our harps.

Yet we remember our homeland:
Eden shall see us once more.
There is an end to our sojourn;
we will sing out on that shore.

The Daughters of Jerusalem Weeping by the Waters of Babylon by John Martin, 1834 – Yale Center for British Art, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=105196448

He walked along from there and saw two other brothers,
James, the son of Zebedee, and his brother John.
They were in a boat, with their father Zebedee, mending their nets.
He called them, and immediately they left their boat and their father
and followed him.
—Matthew 4:18-23

Go on and leave me, children;
your hunger is for more.
He knows, and he can fill it
who calls you from the shore.

I see your way lies elsewhere.
Go; leave the nets to me,
and you will find them mended
if you return to sea—

though you may not.  Yet follow
the road that leads from sight.
It leads through deeps and shallows
and onward into light.

And sorely you’ll be tested,
and sharply you will fall,
but slowly you will get there.
Go on, through sun and squall.

Go with him where he leads your
through sorrow and through joy,
and take the bread he feeds you,
for it will be your joy.

His sorrows will transform you;
his bread the bread that saves—
and I will face those storms, too,
out here upon the waves.

Though we shall fail and falter,
yet follow that bright gleam:
It leads you from these waters
to shores we only dream.

Go on and leave me, children:
Your way is not the sea,
but though our paths are different,
his light will come to me.

Hildesheimer Dom, Christussäule, Berufung der Jünger Jakobus und Johannes By Bischöfliche Pressestelle Hildesheim (bph) – [1], Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10070343

It’s sleeting, and the Mexican next door
is trying to make a snowball from the ice.
Remember the first time I went up north?
“It won’t make snowballs just because it’s white:
If it’s too cold, the crystals, they won’t stick.
You can’t make snowmen either, Texas girl.”
I’d never known that there was such a thing,
“too cold for snowballs.” What, then, is the world?
Where I come from, all snow is record snow;
we never learn to drive on icy streets.
My husband laughs at snowstorms.  What is known?
The sting of wind; the chattering of teeth;
the mortal body crying out for warmth;
the comfort of the roof, the closing door—
surely these are the same things, south or north—
these warming hands. What else would hands be for?

The view out my front window tonight.

Frost and chill, bless the Lord;
praise and exalt him above all forever.
Hoarfrost and snow, bless the Lord;
praise and exalt him above all forever.
—Daniel 3: 69-70

Ice and snow, bless the Lord:
Praise, exalt him over all.
Cold as sharp as any sword,
mercury, in singing fall.

Wind that brings us to our knees,
tears away our fruitless words;
praise him, snapping of the trees;
praise him, silence of the birds.

Wake we in an altered world;
gone the green of yesterday.
Hope and heartache, bless the Lord;
praise, exalt—yet do not stay.

Nights of vigil, dawns of frost,
morning glinting crystal-bright,
break a pathway for the lost
homeward-leading through the light.

Praise him, yes, and mercy beg.
Beauty, be not pitiless.
Though the winter sap our strength,
may we rest in kindliness.

Praise, exalt him, cold and chill;
praise him ‘til the snow departs.
Under winter, silent, still,
song yet fills our sleeping hearts.

Shibata Zeshin – Lacquer Paintings of Various Subjects, Bird and Willow in Snow – 36.100.106 – Metropolitan Museum of Art, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=84971624

The lizard on the sidewalk
is eaten now by ants;
what poison did he die of,
what happenstance?

The vulture in the roadway,
who eyes the mangled fur
of something there, stalks closer:
A feast occurs.

It twists my heart with pity—
Oh, may his wings be furled
in every home and city,
and in the world.

Let him not take the updraft;
let hawks all rest today.
Be every talon kept back
and take no prey.

Let everything still hunted
find shade in which to hide.
Let every blade be blunted
and turned aside.

Be every cannon silenced
as if death had its fill,
was glutted on our violence:
Let it be still.

But sirens in the distance
will sound, or soon or late,
implacable, insisting
we meet our fate.

If it cannot be peaceful—
a sudden fall, or sick
and gone like that, at ease, so—
let it be quick.

Let not the vultures taste us
before we’ve gasped our last.
Have mercy, Lord, and haste us
where pain is past

and hawks, they nest with rabbits,
the lion with the lamb.
Let us that peace inhabit,
and death be damned.

Granite vulture from Temple of Taharqa, Sanam Abu Dom, Napatan Period, 25th Dynasty, Photo By Ian Alexander – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=122387873

Sing, Muse, as you sang out for Homer once;
sing out the love of brothers bound by blood
not of their birth, their mother’s wails and grunts,
but of the miles they marched as one in mud,
of that they shed or that unleashed in flood.
Sing not of life beginning but of death,
and sing, O Muse, ‘til you run out of breath.

So Virgil heard you; so we hear you still
and give you yet more matter for your song.
Sing out, O Muse, and sing it with a will,
as if the soldier’s glory were as long
as yours, or made the stench of rot less wrong,
or gladdened mothers weeping out their eyes.
Let us console ourselves: Sing us these lies.

Sing out the old refrains of long-dead men
who were not safe, although they lived as kings.
We slaughter Iphigenia again,
and Clytemnestra’s waiting in the wings
until Orestes comes. Electra sings
for vengeance, and then wails as exiles do.
Sing out that song, O Muse—we know it, too.

For all your song is gilt atop our grief,
as on the horns of cattle sacrificed
we bless their blood with layers of gold leaf
and pray that all these countless deaths sufficed,
that somehow peace into their flesh was spliced
and if we set it free it will remain
so that these fleeting lives were not in vain.

Then sing, O Muse, yet louder than before
as once you sang for Homer: Of a home
that beckons still upon some farther shore.
We never have seen ours, but we have known
that somewhere mercy answers every groan
and there alone our endless wars will cease.
Sing out, O Muse, that someday we’ll have peace.

Muse, perhaps Clio, reading a scroll (Attic red-figure lekythos, Boeotia, c. 430 BC), Louvre Museum, Photo By Klügmann Painter – Jastrow (2006), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=668158

John the Baptist saw Jesus coming toward him and said,
“Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.”
—John 1:29-34

You have not asked a holocaust
nor anything I’ve sacrificed,
but offered all to save the lost,
a spotless lamb yourself, O Christ.

The gifts upon your altar laid
and offered here to feed its fire
were never ours, but what you made,
and they are not what you desire.

O Lamb who came to tend the flock
and shepherd them from death to life,
you laid yourself upon this rock
to spare us from the falling knife,

for you do not desire our death,
our harvests given to the flame.
You want us, Lord, each heart and breath
afire to praise your glorious name.

You do not ask our sons, our wealth
to fill intemperate demand;
instead, O Christ, you give yourself
to free us from the tempter’s hand.

Then come, O people of the flock;
come see the shepherd sacrificed
who lays himself on Isaac’s rock:
Behold, the lamb of God is Christ!

Agnus Dei c. 1635–1640, by Francisco de Zurbarán, Prado Museum, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=160338