Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, THE GREAT WAGER, by CALE YOUNG RICE


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

THE GREAT WAGER, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: If need be, god of the living universe
Last Line: Unless it is one you open and tread with us.
Subject(s): Beauty; Evil; God; Nature; Universe


If need be, God of the living universe,
Withdraw your Spirit a little while from moulding
The nebulae of Orion, or from herding
The million clusters of the Milky Way,
And send its strength into our planet-mote
To help destroy the Evil Powers threatening
Whatever of beauty and truth, hope and freedom,
Has been infused into us through the ages.
Let vast Aldebaran fare alone for a little,
Or even fixed Polaris slip its mooring
And wander, if you must, to assure us
That not we alone seek to evolve
A world less wasteful of our blood and tears.
The supreme hour has come to make clear
Whether our oath that tyranny shall not prevail,
Tooth and claw, is your oath as well --
So clear that, after the victory we vow,
None shall ever again be left to doubt
That you are the Great Ally we march and suffer with.
The stakes are humanity's for the first time,
Not those of a single nation. The wager on you,
As the wheel of fate spins inscrutably,
Is all our hard-won hope and faith in the future.
And even though the battle should be lost,
Our trust in you need not be, if thenceforth
We can be sure you were ardently in it.
But if we cannot, we shall still question
As futilely and confusedly as before,
Whether we have not merely built temples
To an invisible God who is no God,
Or who with greater needs in greater worlds
To reckon with, has no reserves to send us --
Or who, perhaps, has no desire to send them.
And were that so, we should utterly raze
All shrines to all deities our dreams
Deludedly endow with existence
And rear one to human strength alone;
Or boldly assert that we intend instead
To plant jungles of hate and tyranny
From which to spring and ravage, as our foes do:
Confessing thus, in final disillusion,
That beauty, goodness, and truth are lamps kindled
By our hands alone upon this planet,
Not by the spreading radiance of your Spirit
Immortally resurgent through all Being.
Therefore if time is not an addled egg,
Whose only certain yield is corruption,
Let it now hatch at last and reveal
That you indeed are the Providence within it.
Break the shell, in a way to show surely
That not we alone, and without reason,
Are fighting the strange battle of right and wrong
In a universe spawning both unwittingly,
And so cannot alone lay claim to the victory
When it has come, as come it must and shall.
For no faith in ourselves is finally faith
That is not faith in a universe whose aims
Are those of an immanent Life, Mind, and Spirit.
And no doubt is so lonely as a belief
In one unpityingly devoid of them.
Break the shell -- though not inconceivably
With a miracle of impossible Omnipotence
Disruptive of all faith in all order,
But only, in the accustomed way of Nature,
With such releasing flashes of inspiration
As through the centuries have come to clear
The lenses of our thought and imagination
Of the myopic mists that prevent us
From seeing there is no road to victory
Which does not lead as well to final defeat,
Unless it is one you open and tread with us.





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