Spiritual Poetry
“Where the most beautiful wild flowers grow, there man’s spirit is fed, and poets grow.”
– Henry David Thoreau
Seeing God Everywhere: Essays on Nature
and the Sacred
contains essays but also a number of wonderful spiritual poems from various traditions. The poems in this slideshow were taken from the book.
For as long as humankind has woven words into the creations of beauty that we call poetry, spiritual themes have beckoned to poets. This is quite natural. As people embark upon the exploration of both their inner and outer worlds, Spirit awaits, just as a shore surely awaits all ships that hold to a well-oriented bearing. Poet-seekers find Spirit in the natural world that surrounds them as well as in the deep reaches of the human heart, and the best help others to share the experience with them through the poem.
This slide show offers a sampling of spiritual poetry from a number of different poetic traditions and civilizations. These selections are taken from the World Wisdom book Seeing God Everywhere: Essays on Nature and the Sacred (2003), and so they are generally oriented to the perception of God’s Presence in the world of Nature. The images are simply beautiful scenes of nature that, hopefully, will complement the themes of the poems.
We are lucky indeed if we can join in the experience of the great mystic-poets who are inspired to see God everywhere. One scripture has put the Reality of God’s Presence and our capacity to perceive it thus: “Unto God belong the East and the West, and whithersoever ye turn, there is God’s Countenance.”
Please go to the next slide to find something of God’s Countenance in the first poem…
His praise and echo…”
Nothing is without voice:
God everywhere can hear
Arising from creation
His praise and echo clear.
You travel far and wide
To scout and see and search;
If God you fail to see,
You have nothing observed.
— Angelus Silesius
And sit with me among the white clouds?”
I climb the road to Cold Mountain,
The road to Cold Mountain that never ends.
The valleys are long and strewn with stones;
The stream broad and banked with thick grass.
Moss is slippery, though no rain has fallen;
Pines sigh, but it isn’t the wind.
Who can break from the snares of the world
And sit with me among the white clouds?
— Han Shan
Naught but one Substance/
and one Essence see.”
Hidden under all forms of thought,
Under the form of all created things:
Look where I may, still nothing I discern
But Thee throughout this universe...
Erase the words “this” and “that”: duality
Denotes estrangement and repugnancy:
In all this fair and faultless universe
Naught but one Substance and one Essence see.
— Jami
Tewa: Song of the Sky Loom
Oh our Mother the Earth oh our Father the Sky
Your children are we
with tired backs we bring you the gifts you love
So weave for us a garment of brightness
May the warp be the white light of the morning
May the weft be the red light of evening
May the fringes be the falling rain
May the border be the standing rainbow
Weave for us this bright garment
that we may walk where birds sing
where grass is green
Oh our Mother the Earth oh our Father the Sky
A bird or butterfly”
Beneath the autumn sky
Some blossoms grow, which never see
A bird or butterfly.
— Basho
Move me”
An Eskimo song: The Great Sea
The great sea
Has sent me adrift,
It moves me as the weed in a great river,
Earth and the great weather
Move me,
Have carried me away
And move my inward parts with joy.
What you are, root and all…
I should know what God and man is”
Photo courtesy of National Park Service
Flower in the Crannied Wall
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
— Alfred Lord Tennyson
A fish cannot drown in water,
A bird does not fall in air.
In the fire of creation,
Gold doesn’t vanish:
The fire brightens.
Each creature God made
Must live in its own true nature;
How could I resist my nature,
That lives for oneness with God.
— Mechtild of Magdeburg
Nothing ever polished it. “
The water is clear all the way down.
Nothing ever polished it. That is the way it is.
— Keizan
Flow with the word Allah, Allah”
The rivers all in Paradise
Flow with the word Allah, Allah,
And every longing nightingale
He sings and sings Allah, Allah.
— Yunus Emre
It puts forth flowers and then withers”
Nahuatl: Aztec Song
We only came to sleep
We only came to dream
It is not true
No it is not true
That we came to live on the earth
We are changed into the grass of springtime
Our hearts will grow green again
And they will open their petals
But our body is like a rose tree
It puts forth flowers and then withers
Where I wander—You!
Where I ponder—You!
Only You everywhere, You, always, You.
You, You, You.
When I am gladdened—You!
And when I am saddened—You!
Only You, everywhere You!
You, You, You.
Sky is You!
Earth is You!
You above! You below!
In every trend, at every end,
Only You, everywhere You!
— Levi Yitzchak of Berditchov
image by Thomas G. Barnes @ USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database / Barnes, T.G. & S.W. Francis. 2004. Wildflowers and ferns of Kentucky. University Press of Kentucky.
Silently a flower blooms,
In silence it falls away;
Yet here now, at this moment, at this place,
the whole of the flower, the whole of
the world is blooming.
This is the talk of the flower, the truth
of the blossom:
The glory of eternal life is fully shining here.
— Zenkei Shibayama
