A new poem: "`The Only Secret Thing"

 

 

The Only Secret Thing

 

“The Three Great Secret Things,” said John

Hoyer Updike, the great American man

of letters, double winner of the Pulitzer Prize

and avery accolade save the Nobel, “are sex,

religion, and art,” and he devoted his life

to exploring the mystery of the human condition

through his poetry and alter egos, protagonists

of all his stories and novels, young David Kern

of “Pigeon Feathers,” Harry Rabbit Angstrom

of his Rabbit tetralogy, and his Jewish writer

Henry Beck whom he had win the Nobel Prize

for Literature, and many less well-known

fictional characters; but “there is only the self

and God,” said the mystic teacher of the way

of what is to come, whose nativity history

assigned to Christmas Day, the only secret thing

that is you and me, the Self that we are all born

to be when we resolve the perennial mystery

of the Three Great Secret Things.