Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, HOW LONG?, by LAURENCE B. RIDGELY


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

HOW LONG?, by                    
First Line: And thou continuest holy!
Last Line: And thou continuest holy in infinite love.


"And Thou continuest holy!
"Thou, the One whom Israel worships!"
So one sufferer cried.

"And Thou continuest holy?" Thou, today?
Though the golden moonlight in Ethiopia
floods mountains and ravines
where frightened hordes are fleeing,
and the rising sun reveals in its blaze
a ruined city, streets like shambles,
roads and hillsides ploughed deep with shell holes
and strewn with festering corpses,
the air quivers with wailing
and Moloch, sated with human victims,
shouts to all the world:
"Look and see
that Violence is the way, the only way to Victory."

Yes, and even in the western world
the land of liberty, genii of violence, minions of Mars, makers of death,
strong in their claim of right to serve themselves,
are pouring forth their lethal horrors
for all the world to use,
self-centered citizens and officials
leave the needy to their need
while they themselves draw pay,
laborers lift their hands
against authorities,
against employers and against one another,
and hirers do the same,
while idleness and luxury,
poverty and extravagance,
flow on side by side,
and vice and crime spread like a plague,
and courts and churches fail to cure.
"And Thou continuest holy?"
Is there no sense of justice in thine holiness?
no sense of pity?
Art Thou so holy, so apart, so aloft
from all things mortal
that Thou carest not
or that Thou canst not bring forth for man
either righteousness, joy or peace?
No. Not apart.
In all things mortal and in all the infinite world of nebulae,
all the infinite world of the atoms,
of the telescope and of the microscope,
the One Life moves,
and behind and within all the Life, one Heart.
But the heart of the infinite
is the heart of an infinite progress.
Today is not without yesterday
nor without tomorrow,
and the immeasurable suffering of life
is inseparable from the immeasurable gladness
of perfection.
Today is the nebula, formless and liquid,
fiercely and unmorally evolving
which in the course of ages
becomes a sun, a planet, a group of worlds
with loci of personality.
And in each world Life, moving,
moves on from lower to higher,
meeting new obstacles,
battling, suffering, overcoming.
The suffering passes, but the life remains.
Today may have its horrors.
Moloch may claim his victims and his victories,
but still today under our sun
there are some lands where joy of freer gladder life
already won through pain, is going on.
And such joy yet will come
even to the conquered.
Love is the key
and love the power in which we move
through all confusions on to perfect Life.

Yes, Thou continuest holy.
Thou infinite life, Thou infinite love.
Teach us, Thou, to look at all things
through Thine infinity
and see that there is neither fore nor aft
nor time nor space
in that which we call joy,
but only Love and Life which is and was and ever shall be;
that through all crash of worlds and pains of life
Thy Love lives on,
Thy process moves us on,
and Thou continuest holy in infinite love.





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