Leviathan

You made Leviathan to play with,
delighting in the crushing depths,
and in his mass you placed your Spirit,
to fountain up with every breath.

The birds that fly beyond the sunrise
can never migrate from your sight.
Before the hatchling's feeble first tries
you plot the movements of its flight.

And if a sparrow falls from heaven
you mark the place where it goes down,
for you who numbered every feather
were with it in the air and ground.

Then when I turn and flee you headlong
you wait for me at journey's end.
Should I refuse your call and sending
you are beside me as I stand.

So Jonah found you in the gullet
and in the bowels of the whale.
You came up with him, wrack and vomit,
in the bright sunlight on the shale.

Praise God who made the whales and fishes,
who made the sparrows and the hawks.
Praise God who made me as he wishes,
my fins and feathers, starts and balks.

The Pistrix, the Sea Monster that swallows Jonah By Sergioizzo – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57892841

Jonah

From Jonah’s song in the belly of the fish:

From the bottom of the ocean,
from the belly of the deep,
in the current's ceaseless motion
where the roots of mountains sleep,
I am crushed and I am frozen,
tangled up in wrack and weeds.
Hell alone is left below this:
You have cast me in the dea.

Swallowed by a deeper darkness
when the parted waters closed,
I am drowned within the heartbeat
of a mind that won't let go.
Can you hear me still, O Father?
Could your hand reach down so low?
I am buried in these waters;
I am carried where they go.

You who made both light and shadow
wrote your name upon them all;
I could read it if I knew how
somewhere on these prison walls.
So I cry to you—I shout it!—
just a whisper in your halls.
Father, send your mercy down here!
How much deeper will I fall?

The Pistrix, the Sea Monster that swallows Jonah (La Pistrice che ingoia Giona, XIII sec. – Campanile del Duomo di Gaeta) By Sergioizzo – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57892841

Jonah In the Whale

You cast me out into the deep,
and oh! Its waves closed over me
where restless sailors sink in sleep
beneath the ceaseless-heaving sea.

There's but one pit, on sea or land,
one grave that swallows every soul.
I dove for it t'escape your hand,
but even there you took me whole.

And now in deeper dark I lie,
entombed alive and left to rot,
the endless echoes of my cry
a pulse that sounds in every thought.

Does sunlight glint off rolling waves?
I wouldn't know; I cannot see.
Where is the God that seeks and saves?
What shadow presses down on me?

The dead will never lift their hands;
I raise mine here and strike the roof,
lift up the praise your name demands:
I am alive, and this is proof.

You called me once, and I refused;
through sea and storm I fled your will,
but if, Lord, I can still be used
let me my calling now fulfill.

Wheree'er this whaleship bears me to,
I'll bear its darkness still within.
I know this, God, but even so,
let me see sunlight once again.