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"Gnostic Gospels"

By |Posted Tuesday, May 1, 2007, at 7:16 AM

Click here   to listen to Edward Hirsch read this poem.


We are like a surviving Gnostic sect,
*****living in caves and eating fallen fruit,
**********practicing our own brand of adoration,

which is devoted to wondrous signs,
*****inner mysteries, the radical unknown.
**********If you bring forth what is within you,

what you bring forth will save you.
*****If you do not bring forth what is within you,
**********what you do not bring forth will destroy you,

so Jesus said.  Let others praise
*****the electrifying force of mass media
**********or kneel at the bruised altar of politics.

We keep faith with the technology
*****of the body, with the voices of pilgrims
**********naming the unnamed and resurrecting

dead languages of grief, inaudible pitches
*****of praise.  We believe in the root power
**********of words, dreams, ecstatic trances, visions.

You are my twin and true companion,
*****Jesus said to the citizen, examine yourself
**********and be called "the one who knows himself."

It's true that our robes were stripped
*****from us, yet we are as stubborn as birds
**********searching for morsels of food in winter.

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Edward Hirsch is the author of Earthly Measures.

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