Poetry and Religion

Religions are poems. They concert our daylight and dreaming mind, our emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture into the only whole thinking: poetry. Nothing's said till it's dreamed out in words and nothing's true that figures in words only. A poem, compared with an arrayed religion, may be like a soldier's one short marriage night to die and live by. But that is a small religion. Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition; like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that? You can't pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn; you can't poe one either. It is the same mirror: mobile, glancing, we call it poetry, fixed centrally, we call it a religion, and God is the poetry caught in any religion, caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror that he attracted, being in the world as poetry is in the poem, a law against its closure. There'll always be religion around while there is poetry or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent, as the action of those birds - crested pigeon, rosella parrot - who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.