“But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.” -
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Today I sat to read Ecclesiastes
And somehow came away with comfort.
This book of dread and death and and loss and rot,
Denying all, affirming naught,
It left me smiling, singing, swelling — smirking!
How can the drought and famine pass
So quickly into greener grass
Than any I had seen before?
How can a book whose very air breathes like
Ozymandias — Look on my Words, ye mighty, and despair!
Form from its wreck — colossal, boundless, bare —
Something beside, which feels it will remain?
How can a chapel built of bones, where writ
In rotting catacombs, What you are, we
Once were. What we are, you will someday be —
Make prayer arise, breath, caught — from breathless ribs?
Can we in empty sockets find eyes to see?
Or learn to mimic day, beholding night
When eyes on lightless visages alight
And realize they peer, alike, at me?
It seems the specter spreads to all who sense
Its sickness, unto death — Or is it health?
Is it ruin? Or is it wealth? For time’s
A coin that’s only saved by being spent,
And less is always said than can be meant.
So blessed are they who looking, nothing see,
And being blinded, believers be. Who heed
The hollow beating of the drum which renders
Speaker deaf and hearer dumb. Who knowing
Not of which they speak, and waiting,
Hopeless, hope to seek, in perfect silence
Wait as silent earth inherits the meek.
Despair is named carrion comfort and yet
Vanity! — the carrion call of death so dire
As to claim in its wake all desire,
All reason to carry on, reasons instead
To wake, a clarion: It tolls for thee!
When miserable comforters, ye all are silenced
By the roaring hush, the whirlwind’s rush
A whispered bell that tolls, Vain words are at
An end. It is then that Vanity of vanities!
Reads like a friend.
Is this why fiery holy ground demands,
Kick off your shoes! — Because that Presence which
To gain can mean only, only mean to lose,
Knows too, the upward turn
Which floats from bottom-floored Infernal flame?
Faith, a jackal! — That sickly snarl of sweat and foam
Intrepid, tepid brute of blood and bone.
For faith, too, feeds among the tombs
On rotting bones in rotting wombs,
Faith– Faith it feeds among the dead
Sees blood and body, wine and bread,
Sees things that cannot be, and yet have been,
Sees dry bones, oh son of man, alive again.
And so it is with relished eyes, relieved breath
With vanquished soul alive in death
That I receive the bleeding lines amain,
The deathly, lifely trickle of the vein,
Vanity, vanity, all is vain!