Any Human Face Is A Claim On

Families Will Not Be Broken. Curse And Expel Them, Send Their Children Wandering, Drown Them In Floods And Fires, And Old Women Will Make Songs Of All These Sorrows And Sit On The Porch And Sing Them On Mild Evenings.

I Think The Connection Between Poetry And Theology, Which Is Profound In Western Tradition - There Is A Great Deal Of Wonderful Religious Poetry - Both Poetry And Theology Push Conventional Definitions And Explore Perceptions That Might Be Ignored Or Passed Off As Conventional, But When They Are Pressed Yield Much Larger Meanings, Seem To Be Part Of A Much Larger System Of Reality.

There Is So Little To Remember Of Anyone - An Anecdote, A Conversation At A Table. But Every Memory Is Turned Over And Over Again, Every Word, However Chance, Written In The Heart In The Hope That Memory Will Fulfill Itself, And Become Flesh, And That The Wanderers Will Find A Way Home, And The Perished, Whose Lack We Always Feel, Will Step Through The Door Finally And Stroke Our Hair With Dreaming Habitual Fondness Not Having Meant To Keep Us Waiting Long.

I Really Can't Claim Ever To Have Had An Exceptionally Close Relationship With A Minister. I'm Always There. I Pay My Pledge. I Listen And Observe With Interest. I'm Very Sympathetic With The Rigor And The Aesthetic Quality Of What They Do. Aside From That, I Don't Have A Kind Of Personal Experience With Any Of Them That I Could Consider Privileged, So To Speak.

People Don't Acknowledge Loneliness In Themselves, And Don't Appreciate Its Benefits, The Reflection And Attentiveness That Come With It, The Deepened Acquaintance With Oneself.