My Invocation

I am about 350 lines into my first epic, which, upon competition nine cantos later, will be the longest and most unpublishable poem I have ever written.

While the epic which I don’t imagine can take me less than 4500 lines will have no audience (I don’t imagine many will go for a polygamous marriage of Christianity, psychology and the epic tradition), I think the invocation follows up the discussion of God’s re-telling of the lives of the Hebrews-11 folks.

Epics, as I mentioned in an earlier post, are not invented by the poet but rather sung to him by a Muse who has a greater scope of the story. It is my prayer that I learn to let such a Muse interpret the story of my own life.

O come and sing thy mercy over me
O Muse, enwoven in the tapestry
Of exiled people who resolved to die
And met their executioner whose eye
Was strangely turned away, as if he saw
A higher justice with a softer claw.
O thou who on Moriah stayed the hand
That would obey but could not understand,
Who strove with man and blessed him in the hip,
And chose a spokesman hesitant of lip,
O thou who heard the cries of the enslaved
As thou would’st later hear for the depraved,
And chose the longer road of lab’rous arts,
Engraving by degrees thy name in hearts
Becoming like their lifeless forms of stone,
For thou hast named the renegade thine own—
Sing thine own telling of the life of she
Who drank all tales without discrepancy;
And as the Sirens fade to Orph’us’ song
May thine be proved the truth, exposing wrong.
O sing, for thou hadst sung to man before:
To Joseph with his en’mies on the floor,
And to the Poet King a mournful dirge,
To worm-besweltered prophets of a purge
That you revoked, to seekers of thy face
Who saw it from afar and called it Grace.