George Atkins

Brethren, we have met to worship and adore the Lord our God;
Will you pray with all your power, while we try to preach the Word?
All is vain unless the Spirit of the Holy One comes down;
Brethren, pray, and holy manna will be showered all around.

Brethren, see poor sinners round you slumbering on the brink of woe;
Death is coming, hell is moving, can you bear to let them go?
See our fathers and our mothers, and our children sinking down;
Brethren, pray and holy manna will be showered all around.

Sisters, will you join and help us? Moses' sister aided him;
Will you help the trembling mourners who are struggling hard with sin?
Tell them all about the Savior, tell them that He will be found;
Sisters, pray, and holy manna will be showered all around.

Is there here a trembling jailer, seeking grace, and filled with tears?
Is there here a weeping Mary, pouring forth a flood of tears?
Brethren, join your cries to help them; sisters, let your prayers abound;
Pray, Oh pray that holy manna may be scattered all around.

Let us love our God supremely, let us love each other, too;
Let us love and pray for sinners, till our God makes all things new.
Then He'll call us home to Heaven, at His table we'll sit down;
Christ will gird Himself and serve us with sweet manna all around.

Seamus Heaney

This is one of my favorite selections of poetry, not surprisingly from Heaney's Field Work. It is the second section of the poem "Casualty."

II

It was a day of cold
Raw silence, wind-blown
Surplice and soutane:
Rained-on, flower-laden
Coffin after coffin
Seemed to float from the door
Of the packed cathedral
Like Blossoms on slow water.
The common funeral
Unrolled its swaddling band,
Lapping, tightening
Till we were braced and bound
Like brothers in a ring.

But he would not be held
At home by his own crowd
Whatever threats were phoned,
Whatever black flags waved.
I see him as he turned
In that bombed offending place,
Remorse fused with terror
In his still knowable face,
His cornered outfaced stare
Blinding in the flash.

He had gone miles away
For he drank like a fish
Nightly, naturally
Swimming towards the lure
Of warm lit-up places,
The blurred mesh and murmur
Drifting among glasses
In the gregarious smoke.
How culpable was he
That last night when he broke
Our tribes complicity?
'Now you're supposed to be
An educated man,'
I hear him say. 'Puzzle me
The right answer to that one.'

Operation

Blood pours
As knives score
And whispers crawl
Across the floor

Swimming eyes gleaming
Sinking as pain's revealing
Truth and hope receding
Glassy now, Death is proceeding

Blink the thoughts as mind shuts
Drop the hand as scalpel cuts
Slump the shoulders, pensive feelings

The doctor slipped

Listening

When we work so hard to make sure people understand us, what do they hear if not the sound of themselves? If all we communicate is an attentiveness to others' feelings, then we are on the road to hell. I seek to communicate, but I do not need to make sure I am understood in the initial -it is the feedback that tracks this. When I make the message a method of praise and not understanding, I lose both elements and look a fool.

Correctness

If political correctness is so important, then how will the pressing questions of the day be discussed? If we cannot discuss the pressing questions of the day, how can we ever hope to overcome our opposition?

As we continually sink into the neutered state of political correctness and foolish pandering we will lose ourselves in the mire of stupidity that comes from a lack of challenge and debate.

To think is to want to speak. And when we no longer have the freedom to speak, we will slowly regress until we have no thoughts. At that point, political correctness will have no more power, because the political will control what is correct and what is not.

What we give up, when we say political correctness is more important than truth, is the ability to distinguish anything. Our world becomes fifty shades of gray, then shadow. After shadow -darkness.