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For the feast of St George in 2005 I wrote a poem. I’ll post it here, but if you have criticisms, please be gentle. My self-esteem may be crushed.
St George
The arms of your cross spread wide
To free captives,
To defend paupers,
To heal the sick
And to ride forth as the champion of kings.
Prayers muffled by prison walls
Fill with sweet smoke the hall of Heaven,
And wounds are but jewels
Fitted into a crown
wrought by the hands of God.
With your spear
Deliver my soul from the worm
And carry out your due trophy.
Emblazon yourself on shields
In the cities of tsars,
And intercede for the farmers,
For the flocks,
For the sceptred isles and rocky peninsulas.
We carry your banner as our own.
Very nice!
ReplyDeleteI'm glad to see all this attention paid to my husband's nameSaint.
I really get a sense of entrusting "your" soul to the Great Martyr. A position I now intuit as right, but being relatively new to the Orthodox faith compared to my years as a Protestant, it doesn't come quite naturally to me. I pray for the help of the Saints and ask for them to save me, but I don't think I entrust the whole care of my soul to them in this solitary-seeming way yet.
I'm not a very studied student of poetry. I just like what I like, and for what it's worth, I like this!
Thank you, my friend, I'm glad you liked it! I'm not really a studied student of poetry, either. I didn't really spend much time on it in college, and only started reading it very much when I moved back here from Greece. For some reason, all I could think about was English poetry for most of that first year we were back!
ReplyDeleteIt's true that I've been writing it for a long time now, but I'm a rank amateur. I did win 1st place in the poetry section of the Assemblies of God Fine Arts Festival when I was 14! I was also published in Death to the World, which I've already blogged about.
I wonder if you were homesick for lyric English, or if something in the Greek language inspired you towards lyricism.
ReplyDeleteI missed your Death to the World poem, if it's not too much trouble...
I'm fairly certain it was the former, unless Greek inspired an equal and opposite reaction. Generally, Modern Greek is not something I associate with lyricism, although there are lyric poets that I hear are admirable (my own professor admires Pentzikis a great deal).
ReplyDeleteHow could you possibly have missed one of my posts? I thought you slavishly read all of them! Well, here it is: http://logismoitouaaron.blogspot.com/2008/12/my-poem-in-death-to-world.html
I became slavish sometime around Fr. Justin's visit, half a year after your totally AWESOME DTTW pome post.
ReplyDeleteWell, sometime when you're bored, you'll have to go back and read a bunch of those old posts and see how they compare to my newer ones. But do you realise that from about mid-December of 2008 to sometime around March of 2009 I was posting twice a day, every day? I don't even remember half the stuff I posted!
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