Homelessness of the soul does exist

It has been a year since I posted anything on this my blog here. Anyway, that one year has taught me (the hard way) what ‘real life’ is really all about. I have even known homelessness of the soul, body and spirit.

I’m hoping i will get back into blogging. To begin with, I’d like to share this piece here by Jessica Powers, a Carmelite nun whose work i seem to be able to relate to (though i am so not close to her lifestyle). This is from her book ‘Poetry as prayer’

There is a homelessness

By Jessica Powers

There is a homelessness, never to be clearly defined

It is more than having no place of one’s own

No bed or chair

It is more than walking in a waste of wind

Or gleaming the crumbs where someone else has dined

Or taking a coin for food or cloth to wear

The loan of things and the denial of things are possible to bear

It is more, more, than homelessness of heart

Of being always a stranger at love’s side

Of creeping up to a door only to start

At a shrill voice and to plunge back to the wide

Dark of one’s own obscurity and hide

It is the homelessness of the soul, in the body sown

It is the loneliness of mystery

Of seeing oneself a leaf, inexplicable and unknown

Cast from an unimaginable tree

Of knowing one’s life to be a brief wind blown

Down a fissure of time in the rock of eternity

The artist weeps to wrench this grief from stone

he pushes his hands through the tangled vines of music

but he cannot set it free

It is the pain of the mystic suddenly thrown

back from the noon of God to the night of his own humanity

It is his grief, it is the grief of all those praying

Infinite words to an infinity

Whom, if they saw, they could not comprehend

Whom they cannot see