THE MOUTH, THE HEART

If I read these scriptures rightly,
The heart gives nutrients, and the mind
gives daily sunlight to the tongue’s soil
Which flowers and bears fruit in its time,
And lets fall blooms and leaves too, as it must—
And so this old room is filled with dried petals,
and desiccated fragments of past fragments.
Hence the madness in these icy drafts,
When late Novembers I surprise myself
With sudden starts of passion for the gales
Who long have buffeted the creaking panes,
And swing the windows open, letting in
A hundred eddies lifting sad and lame
Old syllables babbling themselves at once.
The babbling room! whom I suppose my heart
Alone may comprehend, of all hearts,
the babbling room!—the babbling room!

Eugene Kamensky is a divinity student at the Detroit Baptist Theological Seminary. He has been long inspired by Gerard Manley Hopkins’ masterful use of poetry to praise and exalt God in secular spaces, and he hopes to follow in those footsteps.