Poetic moments

Last week, I had occasion to hear Galway Kinnell read some of his poetry, which was wonderful. Here are a couple gems.

He has a poem entitled "Prayer." Last week, as I was finishing up Augustine's Confessions with my students, trying to get them to see that the whole of life is about our yearning for God, about our learning to want God and to want everything else only in light of God, this poem struck me as proof of something a professor of mine used to say, that every theologian is a failed poet. Here it is in its entirety.

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

And just a line from a longer poem ("The Fundamental Project of Technology") that struck me when I heard it and has come back to me often: "Awareness of ignorance is as devout / as knowledge of knowledge. Or more so."

May God have mercy on us for what we know, for what we fail to know.