Holy Living and Wholly Dying

Terence Heywood

"Yet when each of us in his own heart looks
         He finds the God there far unlike his Books."
                                  Fulke Greville
This is the favorite walk of theological students,
especially when the last leaf (tied on by expectancy)
     hangs from the hollow
     willow

like a trunk-label with the name MOURNFUL. And the fields are
as bare as an interior by Hammershôi, though far vaguer
     through the cloudy ammonia
     of anaemia.

Never will these chests be filled out by dogma,
never will zbese mouths unlearn their feebleness
     through conned manual
     or ritual.

Empty cones cover the sapless alders
with black. In black also are the students, clinging
     to a church whose sustenance