Poems

Chapter 101: EXCOMMUNICATE

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About This Book

A varied collection of lyric and narrative verse that moves between short songs, sonnets, rondels, and longer meditative pieces. Many poems use pastoral and seasonal imagery to celebrate fields, harvest, and the sensory life of the natural world while also acknowledging the hardships and dignity of rural labor. Recurring themes include love, absence, memory, and spiritual longing, treated with formal variety and musical language. The tone alternates between celebratory, elegiac, and reflective, blending vivid description with moral and emotional observation.

EXCOMMUNICATE

I do not find an altar, or a priest,

Nor any sacred still confessional;

Masses and vespers, I must shun them all,

Tho’ every belfry bid me to the feast!

I may not wear the cross upon my breast;

Nor make its sign;—or in repentance fall

Before the nichèd saint. In canticle

I must not chaunt one frail blurred note, or least.

For my religion is my joy and shame;

My priest, my altar, canticle, and mass

Art thou! and lest thou hear my creed, and know;

Shouldst hear me sing my love, or pray thy name—

Unshriven with my burden I must go;

Proud, excommunicate, I pagan pass!