Saul The soul of the king an out-of-tune lyre with harpstrings for guts – many sharps and flats. Sent by the LORD the holy pneuma's hand scrapes unholy noise. It maddens the king with dissonant thought – the fatal vibration of blood in the heart until he is dead.

The Cosmic Covenant And it came to me all in a feeling how everything fitted together, this place and ourselves and the animals and the tools, and how the sky held us. – Wendell Berry, A World Lost The cosmic covenant — what Isaiah calls the covenant of peace — is, in Robert Murray’s terms, “the belief in a divinely willed order harmoniously linking heaven and earth.” Murray casts this covenant as a kind of marriage: a union binding heaven and earth, God and Israel, into a si

An Idle King I am an idle king, a hollow king With the wind and sea at my back, Whose shade walks among the dread bones of Hades. My ghostly beard is long, long. Once in time I left my island home With a glut of fishermen, meat and libations; But bad fortune found us Amidst the seas And we were not ready. I do not exist, oh moon. I do not exist, oh little stars. And yet I have dreams In which I sing with a voice, But even that is small, dry and pale. I wait for the gods to co