The Nun by Anonymous (15th Century)

A pious, dark-eyed maiden
Has with loving made me pine.
If for another’s profit
I’ve loved, God, I’m lacking wit!
Woman I love, what’s all this –
You don’t like gay Spring birches?
You, that eight stars go to tint,
Won’t let your beads be silent?
A saint of a religious,
Kind to the choir, not to us?
Enough of bread and water
For God’s sake, and cress abhor!
Mary! with these beads have done,
This monkish Rome religion!
Don’t be a nun – Spring’s at hand,
And cloister’s worse than woodland.
Your faith, my fairest truelove,
Goes quite contrary to love.
Worthier is the ordaining
Of mantle, green robe, and ring.

Come to cathedral birch, to
Worship with trees and cuckoo
(There we shall not be chided)
To win heaven in the glade.
Remember the book of Ovid,
Cease from the excess of faith.
We’ll obtain in the vinetrees
Round the hillside, the soul’s peace.
God loves with blameless welcome,
With his saints, to pardon love.
Is it worse for a maiden
To win a soul in the glen
Than what we have done, to do
In Rome or Santiago?

by Anonymous
(15th Century)
translated by Tony Conran

Judgement Day by R. S. Thomas

Yes, that's how I was,
I know that face,
That bony figure
Without grace
Of flesh or limb;
In health happy,
Careless of the claim
Of the world's sick
Or the world's poor;
In pain craven -
Lord, breathe once more
On that sad mirror,
Let me be lost
In mist for ever
Rather than own
Such bleak reflections,
Let me go back
On my two knees
Slowly to undo
The knot of life
That was tied there.
 
By R. S. Thomas
from Tares (1961) 

Petition by R. S. Thomas

And I standing in the shade
Have seen it a thousand times
Happen: first theft, then murder;
Rape; the rueful acts
Of the blind hand. I have said
New prayers, or said the old
In a new way. Seeking the poem
In the pain, I have learned
Silence is best, praying for it
With my conscience. I am eyes
Merely, witnessing virtue's
Defeat; seeing the young born
Fair, knowing the cancer
Awaits them. One thing I have asked
Of the disposer of the issues
Of life: that truth should defer
To beauty. It was not granted.
 
 
 by R. S. Thomas
 from H'm (1972) 

Easter by R.S. Thomas

Easter. I go to church
to proclaim with my fellows
I believe in the Ressurection -
of what? Here everything
is electric and automatic.
In April a myriad bulbs
are switched on as flowers
incandesce; a new generation
of creatures rehearses
its genetic code. All this is easy.
Earth is a self-regulating
machine; everything happens
because it must. My faith
is in the inevitability
of creation. There will come a day -
dust under a dry sun,
ashes under its incineration...
is there somewhere in all
the emptiness of the universe
a fertile star where the old
metaphors wil apply, where
the bugling daffodil will sound
abroad not the last post, but
a gush of music out of an empty tomb? 

by R.S. Thomas
from Unpublished Poems

One Man Fell Asleep by Daniil Kharms

One man fell asleep a believer but woke up an atheist.
Luckily, this man kept medical scales in his room, because he was in the habit of weighing himself every morning and every evening. And so, going to sleep the night before, he had weighed himself and had found out he weighed four poods and 21 pounds. But the following morning, waking up an atheist, he weighed himself again and found out that now he weighed only four poods thirteen pounds. “Therefore,” he concluded, “my faith weighed approximately eight pounds.”


by Даниил Иванович Хармс (Daniil Ivanovich Kharms)
a.k.a. Даниил Иванович Ювачёв (Daniil Ivanovich Yuvachov)
(1936-37)
translated by Eugene Ostashevsky