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210 Sacred Poems

offered by Spirituality and Practice
​

"Reading sacred poetry is a time-honored spiritual practice. If you'd like to incorporate it into your devotions, we have many resources at Spirituality & Practice for you." 

​Thus write Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat in the world's most inclusive interfaith resource center, the website Spirituality and Practice.  Every April for the last seven years, during National Poetry Month in the United States, they have offered thirty poems for interfaith readers.  I have compiled the poems into one list of 210 poems, with links to their site for each poem. Enjoy. 
​

1. The Sun Never Says by Hafiz
2. One Song by Rumi
3. Metamorphosis by May Sarton
4. Attachment by Vasant Lad
5. Questions by Ghalib
6. Ryokan and Mary Lou Kownacki
7. Hum by Mary Oliver
8. All That Is Joy by Rabindranath Tagore
9. My Joy by Rabi'a
10. Haiku by Buson and Issa
11. Ecstatic Poems by Kabir
12. Beauty and Ugliness by Lao Tzu
13. Waging Peace by Sarah Klassan
14. The Same Inside by Anna Swir
15. Tears by Svein Myreng
16. That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection by Gerard Manley Hopkins
17. There Is No Road by Antonio Machado
18. Don't Make Lists by Dorothy Walters
19. Aware by Denise Levertov
20. 1979 by Wendell Berry
21. I Like You by Kevin Anderson
22. Roll Call by William Stafford
23. Stone by Charles Simic
24. For What Binds Us by Jane Hirshfield
25. Love after Love by Derek Walcott
26. Healing by Joseph Bruchac
27. Ars Poetica by Blaga Dimitrova
28. Earth Verse by Gary Snyder
29. The Good News by Thich Nhat Hanh
30. Hold on to April by Jesse Stuart
31. Trees Can Be Our Teachers by Satish Kumar
32. Live With the Spirit by Jessica Powers
33. Sixty-Four by Daniel Skatch-Mills
34. Open the Window by Rumi
35. Fern-Leafed Beech by Moyra Caldecott
36. Wild Things by Wendell Berry
37. Three Poems on Presence by Baisao
38. Miracles by Daniel Berrigan
39. Butterflies by Siegfried Sassoon
40. Living by Denise Levertov
41. Goodnight by Carl Sandberg
42. Two Prayers on Grace by James Vanden Bosch
43. What Is the Greatest Gift? by Mary Oliver
44. Three Poems on Hope
45. Not Enemies by Stephen Levine
46. Olive Trees by Marilyn Chandler McEntyr
47. Split the Sack by Rumi
48. The Earth Is Waiting For You by Thich Nhat Hanh
49. Surviving Has Made Me Crazy by Mark Nepo
50. On Forgiveness by Karyn Kedar
51. Morning Has Broken by Eleanor Farjeon
52. Rendition of Psalm 41 by Nan Merrill
53. Welcome Morning by Anne Sexton
54. Love Poems by Susan Landon, Ann Reisfeld Boutte, and Susan R. Norton
55. First Night by Julia Ackerman
56. An Atom of Love by Yunus Emre
57. Dear Diary by Leonard Cohen
58. Freedom to Marry by Barbara Hamilton-Holway
59. Four Sufi Poems
60. Icon by Mary Rose O'Reilley
61. Ecstasy by Hayden Carruth
62. Love Sonnet by Pablo Neruda
63. The Layers by Stanley Kunitz
64. Let Evening Come by Jane Kenyon
65. The Answering Machine by Linda Pastan
66. Soil by Richard H. Goodman
67. Zero Circle by Rumi
68. The True Nature of Your Beloved by Hafiz
69. Sweet Darkness by David Whyte
70. Gift by Czeslaw Milosz
71. A poem by Mirabai
72. A poem by Lalla
73. A poem by St. Catherine of Siena
74. A poem by Meister Eckhart
75. Against Certainty by Jane Hirshfield
76. Serenity Is Not by Katherine Swarts
77. Oneness by Thich Nhat Hanh
78. A poem by William Stafford
79. A poem by Mary de La Valette
80. A Place to Sit by Kabir
81. Living in Hope by Suzanne C. Cole
82. A poem by Jim Cohn
83. Who Knows What Is Going On? by Juan Ramon Jimenez
84. The Guardian Angel by Rolf Jacobsen
85. It Is That Dream by Olav H. Haug
86. Questions by Peter Dixon
87. Have You Not Heard His Silent Steps? by Rabindranath Tagore
88. God's Name by Tukaram
89. Sometimes by Hermann Hesse
90. There You Are by Rumi
91. Earth, Sister Earth by Dom Helder Camara
92. The Way They Held Each Other by Mira
93. A Cushion for Your Head by Hafiz
94. Annunciation by Marie Howe
95. Just Stop by Baba Afdal Kashani
96. That Passeth All Understanding by Denise Levertov
97. Summing Up by Claribel Alegria
98. After the Sea by John O'Donohue
99. The First Book by Rabindranath Tagore
100. The Clay Jug by Kabir
101. White Apples by Donald Hall
102. In the World by Brigid Lowry
103. A poem on Love by Kabir
104. Remember by Joy Harjo
105. Nothing Much by Allison Harris
106. A poem on silence by Baisao
107. Peonies at Dusk by Jane Kenyon
108. Reasons to Meditate by Lisa Cullen
109. The First Book by Rita Dove
110. A poem on abundance by St. Catherine of Siena
111. Soil by Richard H. Goodwin
112. Seeking Your Trace by Fakhr al-Din Iraqi
113. Vision by May Thielgaard Watts
114. A poem on devotion by Mary Lou Kownacki
115. A poem on kindness by Margaret Jain
116. A poem on transformation by Hugh Robert Orr
117. What Does Light Talk About? by St. Thomas Aquinas
118. Love Is by May Swenson
119. Leisure by W. D. Davies
120. Gift by Czeslaw Milosz
121. The Old Elm Tree by the River by Wendell Berry
122. Love at First Sight by Wislawa Szymborska
123. Never Lose the Way by Shihab al-Din Yahya Suhrawardi
124. Living the Scriptures by Lalla of India
125. So Much Happiness by Naomi Shihab Nye
126. There Is a Wonderful Game by Hafiz
127. Poetry by Pablo Neruda
128. On Ordinary Daily Affairs by Layman P'ang
129. A Kiss by Deborah Garrison
130. Is My Soul Asleep? by Antonio Machado
131. On Mother Earth by Jamie Sams
132. When Your Life Looks Back by Jane Hirshfield
133. Memory by Jorge Luis Borges
134. Ask Me by William Stafford
135. Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks by Jane Kenyon
136. A poem - prayer about love and life by Kuan Tao-sheng
137. A poem-prayer for solidarity and justice by Arthur Waskow
138. Growing older with beauty by Robert Terry Weston
139. A Lover Who Wants His Lovers Near by Rabia
140. God Would Kneel Down by St. Francis of Assisi
141. How Then Can We Argue? by Meister Eckhart
142. Each Soul Completes Me by Hafiz
143. This Place of Abundance by St. Catherine of Siena
144. First He Looked Confused by Tukaram
145. Ode to My Socks by Pablo Neruda
146. Summing Up by Claribel Alegria
147. If You Have Nothing by Jessica Powers
148. Paper Cranes by Thomas Merton
149. God Paints the Rainbows by Barb Laski
150. ​A poem about wisdom by Makeda, Queen of Sheba
151. In a Holy Book I Have by Hafiz
152. Little Things by Sharon Olds
153.  Joy by Robert Morneau
154. The Road to God by Melannie Svoboda
155. A poem by Henry Van Dyke
156. Chilean Creed by James Conlon
157. A poem by Edward Searl
158. A poem by Judith Billings
159. The Inner History of a Day by John O'Donohue
160. A Marriage, an Elegy by Wendell Berry
161. The Book of Endings by Sam Taylor
162.  A poem by Hildegard of Bingen
163.  Marriage by Susan R. Norton
164.  A poem by St. John of the Cross
165. A poem by J. David Scheyer
166. My Life by Billy Collins
167. The Foot-Washing by A. R. Ammons
168. Simon the Cyrenian Speaks by Countee Cullen
169.  Early Lynching by Carl Sandburg
170. Easter Night by Alice Meynell
171. Throw Yourself Like Seed by Miguel de Unamuno
172. The Madness of Love by Hadewijch of Antwerp
173. Human Wisdom by Charles Peguy
174. The Gift by Zoraida Rivera Morales
175. A poem by Ly Ngoc Keiu
176. Passing Through by Stanley Kunitz
177. From Recovery by Rabindranath Tagore
178. A poem by Novalis
179. Diving by A E I Falconer
180. Was it Light? by Theodore Roethke
181. The Journey of the Mind by Anya Dunaif
182. Looking West by Sofiy Inck
183. What Is a Hero? by Nimai Agarwal
184. The Word by Swastika Jajoo
185. After I Die by Niti Majethia
186. True… Or Not? By Swastika Jajoo
187. I See The Night by Maya Mesh
188. Sowing Hope by Tammata Murthy
189. Ever Deeper: A Poem for My Grandfather by Will Hodgkinson
190. Blue by Victoria Krylova
191. Pure Love by Gertie-Pearl Zwick-Schachter
192. When the Universe Sings Goodnight by Niti Majethia
193. Plastic Tractors by Will Hodgkinson
194. Perfume Bottles by Fareeha Shah
195. Rift into Childhood by Gracie Griffin
196. When the Sun by Charlotte Rauner
197. The Playground in Winter by Maria Christian
198. The Soul of Nature by Niti Majethia
199. Not Yet by Caie Kelley
200. Artemis by Alice Simmons
201. The Divine Vision by Tanmaya Murthy
202. Backyard Woods by Isabel Bautista
203. The Pear Tree by Caroline Harris
204. I always feel like myself by Pie Rasor
205. Volunteer by Rafik Maharja
206. With a Pencil in My Hand by Gracie Griffin
207. The Sunset of My Life by Meenu ravi
208. The Watching One by Lucia O'Corozine
209. Selected Poems from Around the World by Mary Ernesi, Tanika Stewart, and Odelia
210. Snowflakes Carry My Worries Away by Katie Champlin

Why Read?

In the clatter and clamor of our lives, we need ways to connect deeply with our souls. Whenever we feel depleted, our favorite poets invariably refresh and refuel us. The quality of their attention, the way they notice things we easily overlook, summons the joy and wonder within us. Their songs of both praise and lament speak the words it is sometimes hard for us to articulate. They put us in the presence of the ineffable and the holy. We drop our jaws and swallow our pride...Businessman James Autry captures another attraction of poetry — it "gives you permission to feel." The best poets tap into our deepest yearnings. 

- Mary Ann and Frederic Brussat, Spirituality and Practice

What makes a poem sacred?
​

A poem is sacred if, after reading it or listening to it, you are just a little wiser and kinder, more creative and playful, more attuned to beauty and shocked by injustice, than you would have been otherwise. The poem makes a difference in how you think and live.

The poem need not be religious in order to be sacred.  It does not have to be about God or heavenly ecstasy, or use words like holy and sacred and spiritual. Yes, it can have such themes.  It can be obviously religious.  But it can also be about ordinary life, about cars and dogs and sidewalks, about whole or broken relationships, about sadness and beauty and moonlight, about planets and tulips and cat's eyes. 

Sacredness is a relationship between you and the poem. It lies in how you read the poem and in the fruits of your reading.  Here are some of the best fruits of sacred reading, borrowed from Spirituality and Practice.

​​​attention  -  beauty  -  being present  -  compassion   -  connections  -  devotion  -  enthusiasm  -  faith
forgiveness - grace -  gratitude  - hope - hospitality - imagination  - joy -  justice - kindness - listening
love  -  meaning  -  nurturing  -  openness  -  peace - play  -  questing  -  reverence - shadow - silence
​teachers   -  transformation   -  unity  -  vision   -   wonder  -  x, the mystery  -  yearning  -  you  -  zeal

These fruits are practical and ordinary. The sacred becomes fully sacred only when its values are expressed in daily life: at home and in the workplace, among neighbors and strangers, in the parking lot and the schoolyard, in the voting booth and community center.  The purpose of sacred poetry is to help you live wisely and compassionately, with love and vitality, in the world beyond poetry.  As it achieves its purpose, it simultaneously refreshes and refuels your soul.  It gives you permission to feel.

- Jay McDaniel, December 2020

Reading Fragments of Poems 
​as a Spiritual Practice

​

Recently some friends of mine started an online poetry journal called Heron Tree. It offers you one poem a week - absolutely free.  

As I write this, the poem for the week is Onion Pie by Joey Nicolletti. It begins like this:

The wind, the rattling wall, dinner
baking in the oven, the dead of winter
a string of salt diamonds
alight in a street of slush and starlit ice,
and the cat retires
to his feathery bed.

It is wintertime. I picture my own cat named Zooey, retiring to her own feathery bed.  I think of how delicious it would be to have some onion pie. I picture the street outside, which had not long ago been salted with crystals. I remember the diamonds.

I may not read any further. I know that Joey Nicolletti hopes I will. After all, he wrote the poem as an organic whole, with each part related to the other parts. In her now classic The Life of Poetry (1949)  Muriel Rukeyser speaks of poems as organic wholes full of movement, which grow like trees. She is famous for saying that the universe is like stories, not atoms. For her a poem is a story, too.  

But sometimes I think it's fine just to nibble at a poem, taking a line or series of lines that somehow nourish the imagination and not even completing it. If it's worth reading at all, it's worth reading halfway.

The western religious traditions have a tradition called lectio divina or sacred reading. When you read in a sacred way, you are not looking for rules to live by or ideas to master. You are looking for nourishment of the soul. You take in images from scripture, however fragmentary, and simply rest in them trusting that somehow, in the very resting, some divine nourishment is received. You let the images wash over you and inside you,  in a kind of baptism of the imagination.

I need these baptisms. I need one poem a week. I need some onion pie to sink my imagination into, taking a break from the compulsively busy lifestyle into which I so often fall. Buddhists tell us that paying attention to the world around us and the worlds within us in a mindful way is the heart of spirituality. Poetry can help - even if you nibble.
 
Nibbling 

I choose the word nibbling with care. Reading poetry is a physical activity even as it is a spiritual activity.  Even if we read silently, we hear our own voice reading inside our heads. We pause at the end of lines and between stanzas, not unlike the way in which we pause when we take a breath. Sometimes we quietly move our lips, too, in a subtle and unconscious way. And sometimes we read out loud. Some people draw sharp distinctions between reading out loud and reading silently. Not me.

As we read we bring our bodies with us. We are sitting or walking, standing or lying down. We are looking with our eyes. The founder of process philosophy, Alfred North  Whitehead, says that all of our experiences begin with what he calls the withness of the body. Our bodies are not simply means by which we take our minds from one location to another; they are where the world meets us, including the world of poetry.  As we read a poem our minds may be lost in a faraway land, but our bodies are here, with us, in the reading.  

Imaginative Nibbling

Of course our imaginations are in the reading, too. Our imaginations enable us to move from one portion of the text to another, not unlike the way in which we might eat fruit salad. When you have a bowl of fruit salad in front of you, you choose the particular fruit -- bananas, strawberries, pineapple-- that strikes your fancy.

I think we can read poems like this, too. By this I mean two things. We do not need to read the whole poem if we are nourished by a part. We can stay with that part, and call it a night.

And even if we do read the whole poem, there is no need to read it in a linear fashion. We can jump from one section to another and then go back, not unlike the way in which we jump from one poem to another in an anthology, flipping back and forth. Call it non-linear nibbling.

Many contemporary poems are conducive to imaginative nibbling. They are a collage of lines which can be strung together in a linear order, forming an organic whole; but they can also be enjoyed in a non-linear way as a collage of fragments which can be seen as a whole but also have independent integrity.  

Many sacred scriptures have this quality. Consider the Holy Qur'an. It is a collage of many different poems, and poems within poems, and poems within poems within poems. It is not a rule book, it is a cluster of warnings and invitations, helping us awaken to the unity -- the tawhid - within which we live and move and have our being. Some suras are warnings and some are invitations, but all are inviting us to experience awe and wonder.

Many poems are like mini-Qur'ans. This means that as you read them you can move from beginning to end; but you can also move from middle to beginning or from end to middle. And you can just stay on one or two lines if you are so inclined.  You can begin in the middle, where all beginnings begin.

Beginning in the Middle

Think of how people read the Bible. There is no commandment in the Bible which says: "Thou shalt never begin in the middle." Jews and Christians begin in the middle all the time, turning to this book and that book within the good book. And for process thinkers, influenced by Whitehead, there may even be some divine sanction in it.  According to process theology, the universe is without beginning or end.  God does not create out of nothing but rather out of the pre-existing chaos at hand. This means that even the Holy One began in the middle when he or she began creating our universe. The chaos already existed. The Holy was just giving it a little order. If God can begin in the middle, we can, too. Let the winds of the spirit blow where they will.

For my part, when I begin in the middle, I always look for sentences that do not begin with "The."  There is far too much declaration in the world today.  Too many attempts to tidy things up, when there's so much beauty in the untidy.  Too many ideologies of heart and mind.   Buddhists teach us that there is a lot of spirituality in not having fixed views.

Kissed by Steam

There is a Zen rock garden in Kyoto that's designed so that, wherever you stand, you cannot see the whole.  You see sand and the rocks, but no possibility for a controlling overview. All good poems are like this. Even if they come across as organic wholes, there's no final interpretation. Freedom from finality of statement is one of poetry's  greatest gifts to humanity.

This is why it can be important -- even spiritually enlightened -- to focus on fragments. You are reminding yourself that even if you read the poem as a whole, this whole is nested in a larger whole -- the forever fluid rock garden of the universe -- which is never fully encompassed by any finite observer.  Heidegger reminds us that we are always already inside this whole, and that we can never stand outside it and pretend that we are mere spectators.

When a simple line or phrase in the middle of a poem becomes the subject of your attention, you are aware of an immediate textual background that you don't know and comprehend. You are deciding not to know this background, at least for the moment.   

This deciding not to know the whole is an act of faith. It is faith that there can be meaning in the particular which transcends the meaning of the whole, even as there is meaning in the whole which transcends the meaning of the particular.  Here are the last two lines of Joey Nicolletti's poem:

my wife pulls the Onion Pie
out of the oven, kissed by steam.

Blake reminds us to see heaven in a wildflower and the universe in a grain of sand.  

Onion Pie reminds us that there's more than a little divine steam when you take an onion pie out of the oven on a cold, cold day.  

Maybe that is one of the purposes of poetry at its best.  Maybe it helps us become kissed by the steam. 

​- Jay McDaniel, December 2020

Photo by Ricardo Espejo Catalán on Unsplash