New poem: "In the Wonder of God's Grandeur"

 

In the Wonder of God’s Grandeur

 

There’s a personal story in every story that tells

the real story of everyone’s story, and no two

stories are the same, but as dissimilar as every

story may be, none is stranger than the story

of prize-winning poet Stanley Kunitz.

 

At Harvard, where he earned his bachelor’s

and master’s degrees, by happy circumstance

he chanced upon the poem “God’s Grandeur”

in the library (it was the merciful law of divine

synchronicity calling him home), and he fell

into a life-long trance writing poetry.

 

His entire adult life, he wrote and taught poetry

to find his way through life, a blessing that came

to him “like rapture breaking on the mind,” a

habit dangerously seductive to the creative spirit

that transformed his individual experience

into the meaning of his existence; —

 

But not enough to satisfy the longing that Gerard

Manley Hopkins had awakened in his undergraduate

soul with a poem that inflicted him with an immortal

wound of wonder, and when he was asked by Charlie

Rose, “Are you a believer?”, the 10^th Poet Laureate

of the United States, 95-year-old Stanley Kunitz

reflected, and thoughtfully said:

 

“I’m a believer in the energy and value of the spirit,

but I have no deep conviction about the Godhead,

if there is one. I’m willing to be persuaded, but I’m

not ready yet to say yes,” and he went to his lonely

grave at the ripe old age of 100, still wrestling

in the wonder of God’s grandeur.