Like A Lamb: Sacred Poems

By Simon Pole

Is the speech of angels poetry? Some have called it so. For others, it is the first thing God created, in the form of Wisdom. Whatever poetry might be, it is a means through which we praise and contemplate our Creator.

These are the principles embodied in Like a Lamb, cosmic poet Simon Pole’s newest collection of sacred poetry. From the most extreme events of a lifetime to the small moments of everyday life, the poems of Like a Lamb explore how our lives relate to God, and how we are to live in God’s world. We hear the voices of kings, the hopes of the most ordinary person, the protest of the criminal, the anguish of the lost: all the possible situations of man. From the Roman past, to the biblical record, to the vast universe of stars and beyond, we will follow the working out of salvation in all ages and in all places.

The destination is the Kingdom of God, which is, but not yet. Like a Lamb invites you to wait until that day, in rhythm and rhyme, when in the clouds comes the Son of Man.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon Pole
• Release date: Mar 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215836354

Simon Pole

His mind corrupted by childhood exposure to horror movie matinees, but equally enthralled by the atmosphere of old churches, Simon Pole writes cosmic poetry from the location of Kingsville, Ontario. A graduate of Harvard University, Simon has continued his studies of what is hidden in the dark. Writing is also in his blood, being the great-great-grandson of early Canadian poet Susie Drury.

Book preview

Like a Lamb

In this age I idle am,

Like a glossy, ill-shorn lamb,

Who pranced upon unmown fields,

And to the fence never yields,

Nor a fold at evening seeks.

At the work-yoked ox I sneer,

Who ploughs his row, year on year,

And the cow forever doomed

To lunch be, which comes at noon,

While I from shady glens peek.

On wild grasses graze I good,

And the forest is my hood,

That repels both wind and rain,

And deflects whatever pain

The farmer’s son plots for me.

But sometimes I wonder if

There is a rule I have missed,

Guidance of a greater hand,

Which formed all parts of this land,

The farms and the forest free.

To worship is not a toil

The master who with love oils,

All moving parts of the earth,

And in our hearts kindles mirth

That to be as stars are we.

To shake and dance all the while,

In a thousand unique styles,

Which express the inner flame,

An ember of greater fame,

Of the God who made us all.

So when I wind dusty ways,

And sleep upon roughest hays,

Content I am now to be,

Mindful of the One who sees,

And loves, my untutored call.

The Choice

Particle or person, which do you pick?

Unmade, the beginning, of us and it,

The expanding matrix in which we sit,

Of time, structured star, and molecules thick.

Consider beauty we see in the trees,

At evening, when liquid red is the sky,

And birds, to their homes, in swift bunches fly,

Our hearts then are stirred like leaves in the breeze.

But what is this feeling, whence does it come?

Some firing of synapse across my cheek,

An extra in eyes which food or mates seek.

Is that all, of atoms am I the sum?

Or is it that good which God first proclaimed,

Looking on these trees, as we do the same?

Dolls of Dirt

Among the statues wander I:

Broken head of Zeus, whose blind eye,

Once bold, on Aphrodite falls,

Whose alluring voice now mute calls

To Mars, of shattered arms, and shield,

Which long to the victor have yield;

And other rubble strewn about,

In which the hogs rummage and snout,

Great blocks the vines crack even more,

Until, like pebbles on the shore

Of some vaster sea, washing all,

The old beliefs to ruin fall.

And so I wander free in Christ,

Meek recipient of that geist,

The fruit foretold by greater men,

The triumph of their treaties penned,

The thought which out the pagan drove,

And in the evil altars stove,

The worship of created things,

Like men, and kings, and rocks in rings,

And replaced it with unmade God,

Whom dolls of dirt turn back to sod.

To The One Who Saves

Like rulers of old, who, after some trial,

Or mishap, in struggling up from the sea

A promontory spy, of storm-clouds free,

And say, upon this spit a mighty pile

Will I found, a temple of thanksgiving

To that God, whom in peril I called on,

And out of the wreck the hopeless living

Delivered he to these sands set upon—

So I, stonewright of paper and sure pen,

Who, in modern guise such seas plumbed again

Of despairs unfathomed, buffeting waves

Which love-drowning life all over us pours,

Do hereby erect unto he who saves

This monument on his comforting shores.

Two Trees

Imprint this cross on my heart,

That was there at Eden’s start,

Where those trees for Adam’s use

Forbidden were, though profuse

With apples of godly lore.

What story began we then,

Our human drama which wends

Its tortured way on the path,

Erected by divine math,

But whose traffic is our chore.

Planets in their orbits trace,

Plumb the cosmos’ brilliant face.

Laws of matter, them exalt,

And rules, both our frame and fault,

Their numbers we understand.

But what of words, pictures drawn,

Which events connect life-long:

Mileposts on fate’s crooked track,

Or sense give to sudden acts—

Are these God’s, or mind of man?

Consider then that first tree,

Blooming immortality,

Alpha to that later cross,

Growing with Omega’s loss,

Prefigured where Pishon ran.

Narrative thus has its law,

Appointed like cold or thaw:

For as God made earth for you,

So he seeded stories too,

Authoring our hope in death.

You who write with pen or type,

Exercise as Einstein might,

The lay of both space and time,

Which in two trees all but rhymed,

As we speak with God’s own breath.

Buried God

O quiet Eve of Christmas time,

The deer have broken from the line

Of sombre trees, and sifted snow,

Which lightly in the sky’s breath blows,

Leaves buried yet the winter scrub

Where hoof and tongue have circles dug.

O buried God who ever dwells

Behind the veil which ever tells

Of your presence, though through the sky

The geese have gone to roost and die,

Replace them with angelic thrum,

Let wise men walk where deer succumb.

Of birth in Spring we ever speak,

Of hoarded eggs and mothers’ beaks

Which feed the worm to hungry throats

And water which in torrents floats

Down swollen streams: this life unlocked

Expected is by any clock.

But when the cloak of winter falls

And total is the withered pall

Which snuffs the light and twists the branch,

And too contracts the circumstance

Of chill-blained lives so circumscribed,

What cup of heat can be imbibed?

O there is a cup, beneath it lies

The ragged, wan December skies,

Beside a warm and beating heart

Which always was, and never starts

Or stops to thump: but left concealed

What riven land can be so healed?

No blasted hand can lift