Michael Symmons Roberts went to Oxford a militant atheist. "As university went on I got deeply into philosophy — and the philosophy completely undermined my atheism, by making me realize that there was no overarching objectivity, no Dawkinsian bedrock of common sense if you strip everything away. I realized that atheism was just as culturally conditioned as being a Catholic."
A convert to Roman Catholicism, Roberts has been described by Jeanette Winterson as "a religious poet for a secular age."
Although rooted in the English lyric tradition, his work draws on the language of science (especially genetics and genomics), theology and philosophy.
Sailboarders is from the collection Rising Sparks. The title Raising Sparks derives not from Christianity but from Hasidic Judaism’s belief that the world is full of “fragments of divine light”, scattered at the moment of creation, and that it is the purpose of each individual life to “find and raise” these fragments so as to restore the world to wholeness.
Here, physical and metaphysical become one and the language moves easily between the Old Testament and documentary realism. These men are waiting both for a wind across the ocean--and for divine breath across the void--to fill their sails.
Sailboarders
These men wrestle angels.
Each now sits on an enormous wing waiting for the winds to come
which will not come to taunting or to whistles,
just indifference. These gales have flown for miles
across the primeval darkness of oceans,
fetching up waves, and waves ahead of them.
One gust will animate the faceless imagos,
these giant phosphorescent painted ladies,
send them dancing in a chest-to-chest embrace,
fighting on the beach with a Jacob, an Icarus.
Beyond the chrysalis, they only live one summer,
such is their speed, their coruscating colour.
A poem by Michael Symmons Roberts
A convert to Roman Catholicism, Roberts has been described by Jeanette Winterson as "a religious poet for a secular age."
Although rooted in the English lyric tradition, his work draws on the language of science (especially genetics and genomics), theology and philosophy.
Sailboarders is from the collection Rising Sparks. The title Raising Sparks derives not from Christianity but from Hasidic Judaism’s belief that the world is full of “fragments of divine light”, scattered at the moment of creation, and that it is the purpose of each individual life to “find and raise” these fragments so as to restore the world to wholeness.
Here, physical and metaphysical become one and the language moves easily between the Old Testament and documentary realism. These men are waiting both for a wind across the ocean--and for divine breath across the void--to fill their sails.
Sailboarders
These men wrestle angels.
Each now sits on an enormous wing waiting for the winds to come
which will not come to taunting or to whistles,
just indifference. These gales have flown for miles
across the primeval darkness of oceans,
fetching up waves, and waves ahead of them.
One gust will animate the faceless imagos,
these giant phosphorescent painted ladies,
send them dancing in a chest-to-chest embrace,
fighting on the beach with a Jacob, an Icarus.
Beyond the chrysalis, they only live one summer,
such is their speed, their coruscating colour.
A poem by Michael Symmons Roberts
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