God and Poetry

"Fishing in the Keep of Silence" is a wonderful poem by Linda Gregg and can be found in Garrison Keillor's anthology Good Poems, published by Penguin Books. Here is how the poem begins:


There is a hush now while the hills rise up
and God is going to sleep. He trusts the ship
of Heaven to take over and proceed beautifully
as he lies dreaming in the lap of the world.


Toward the end, the poem says:


God, who thinks about
poetry all the time, breathes happily as He
repeats to Himself: There are fish in the net,
lots of fish this time in the net of the heart.

I find this poem both comforting and humorous. I love the lines "God, who thinks about / poetry all the time." Well, that's nice to know! Poetry is such a human thing, so full of fallibility and pain and hope and beauty and transience and eternity, transcendence and immanence. Are you like that, God? If you, dear God, can understand poetry, then you can understand us humans. Let me recommend to you, O Lord, the work of Galway Kinnell, Li-Young Lee, Mary Oliver, Walt Whitman, W. H. Auden, and Seamus Heaney. These folks understand the human heart!