Sonnets Occasioned by the Psalms
Inspired and inspiring, the Psalms of King David have shaped the Church’s liturgy and the world’s art. David, in his life and in his songs, prefigures the sorrows and triumphs of Jesus Christ, who is the summary and summit of human life. Thus the Psalms contain all the great themes that occupy man in his literature and are a wellspring of poetry. This month we offer four sonnets by Dr. Nathan Lefler selected from a larger cycle of sonnets occasioned by psalms.
Sonnet 3 (Occasioned by Psalm 2)
The art of loving other persons tends
To break the heart of anyone who aims
To love as other selves the hearts whose flames
Burn distantly, and cold, and bright, whose ends
The lover cannot fathom, though he bends
His whole mind to the task and passions tames;
’Til throwing up his trembling hands he blames
The heartlessness of all his would-be friends.
Unless, heartbroken, hearing someone cry,
He stops to listen through his shattered core,
And through the ragged hole there comes undone
A knot he had not known himself to tie.
And looking in the stranger’s eye once more
He newly knows the cry: You are my son.
Sonnet 5 (Occasioned by Psalm 4)
Who hates his mother or his father here?
What could the man have meant? He knew the law.
He must have known the danger too, who saw
The way they hung on every word: the seer
Forsooth! could not have not seen how his mere
Glance or touch inspired holy awe.
How dare he? Galilean riff-raff. Pshaw!
Served him right to hang who had no fear.
Who hates…? Yet my own Ur-lord gently pleads,
King David trills “Be angry, but sin not;”
The rose-tongued warrior-poet, God’s heart-friend,
Casts forth and finds this man whose anger leads
To hatred stranger than a love white-hot
And in their net my ire finds its end.
Sonnet 7 (Occasioned by Psalm 6)
No matter the anguish, morning will come again,
Though every night I flood my bed with tears,
Pleading respite from voracious fears
That feed my blood a toxin from my brain.
Exhausted with my dread and with my pain
I lie spent when the sun at first appears,
Unmoved by the dawn and all that cheers
The world: for me a new day sprung in vain.
So it comes. So what? I have no use
For morning song that makes light of my grief.
And who should blame me if I now accuse
My Father-Lord of rising like a thief?
Glad Robber: you have caught me by surprise,
Stolen in, and heard, and laughed away my sighs.
Sonnet 8 (Occasioned by Psalm 7)
More terrible to me, Thou laughing God
Is that Thou dost enjoy with us our wine,
Delightest in a good joke and incline
To mirth when most would deem we need the rod –
More awful this than even is Thy rage,
Whose signs we righteous read upon the cursed.
Arise, Lord, in Thy anger: Do Thy worst!
God’s People’s guilt our holocausts assuage.
Is this too easy? Trying hearts of old
You lent us outward monitors to gauge
Some semblance of our inward loss or gain,
But now You’ve come among us these are gone.
No human heart Your human eyes withstood,
Whose love-crossed gaze in joyous fury burst.