The Sacred in Secular Poetry

Pagans are fond of poetry. Some truly lovely verses litter our liturgy, and some really horrible ones too! I have been in love with poetry for 18 years. Since I was a young girl I have worshiped Blake, Tennyson, e.e. cummings, Whitman, Scott, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dickinson, Neruda, Ginsberg, Byron Herbert Reece, Donne and Hafiz.

We all know the particularly Pagan verses of Shelley and Byron but there are so many poets we don’t tend to utilize in our rituals. Here are a few of my favorites:

Neruda makes everyday objects intoxicating and sacred. From his suit to an onion to a shoe, he brings the material world vibrantly to life. When you next pass wine, consider this verse from his “Ode to Wine”:

as lascivious velvet,
wine, spiral-seashelled
and full of wonder,
amorous,
marine;
never has one goblet contained you,
one song, one man,
you are choral, gregarious,
at the least, you must be shared.

Hafiz is the most joyful of what I think of as the “Drunken Poets”. His poetry is full of generous, earthy, universal love! His nuggets of wisdom are playful: “You are a divine elephant with amnesia” and “I have never heard a bird or the sun ever say to God ‘I am sorry'”. Here his own “Charge of the Goddess”:

The Real love I always keep a secret.

All my words are sung outside Her window,

For when She lets me in I take a thousand oaths of silence.

But then She says,

Oh, then God says,

“What the hell, Hafiz, why not give the whole World my address.”

Byron Herbert Reece matched Poe for lyricism and darkness. Writing from Southern Appalachia, his balladry is tinged with an inexorable mortality and a fragile beauty. On finding a dead bird he mused” Whose eye was on the sparrow, shifted, and it fell.” What better expresses the joy of Beltane than his “If Only Lovers”?

They go together,
As lovers should,
And take of their love
In the shade of the wood.

It is not ugly,
Nor is it unclean
To lie in the shadow
Unknown and unseen.

e.e. cummings is very unorthodox and in his bizarre verse we are forced to pay attention to what he is actually saying, rather than reading obliviously.What better blessing than “may my heart always be open”?

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old