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.
