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Jonah’s Prayer by Mihaly Babits - Famous poems, famous poets. - All Poetry

Words have become unfaithful things to me, or else am I an overflowing sea, goalless and hesitant, without a shore. Vain words, articulated once before, I carry like dikes, or signposts made of wood, torn hedges carried by a straying flood. Oh if the Master only would provide a bed for my brook’s current and thus guide my steps on sheltered pathways toward the sea; if only He would carve a rhyme for me, a ready-made rhyme, I would avail myself, for prosody, of the Bible on my shelf, so that like Jonah, lazy servitor of God, we hid from Him and later bore not three brief days or months of agonies, but three long years of even centuries, when he went down into the living Fish, in dark hot torments more than he would wish, I too, before I disappear, might find in an eternal Whale whose eyes are blind my old accustomed voice, my words arrayed in faultless battle order; as He made His whispers clear, with all my poor throat’s might I could speak out, unwearied till the night, so long as Heaven and Nineveh comply with my desire to speak and not to die.