An Abject

In February 2015, for the first time in years, I succumbed to 'flu on the cusp of a busy programme of activity. As with many aging adolescents I took out my frustration in foul language aimed at everything and everyone - including the Lord. So much for my attempts at spiritual improvement. By March I had enough strength to sit at my desk and take myself to task with this poem. When I came to the last stanza I found that by chance the first rhymes were the same as in the first lines of the first stanza and so decided to repeat all the rhymes of the first stanza in the last.
   Note: the numbering of the Psalms in the Catholic Douay-Rheims Bible is different from that in Protestant Bibles.
   The preceding three little poems posted below - 'The Blackbirds,' 'In Sickness' and 'Wood Chipper' - record things seen and heard by me from my window whilst recuperating.

----------------

Psalm 83 (Douay-Rheims)

Burning in fever, how use your little strength,

Hoarding for healthtime, or easing fever’s length?
Ah no, in cursing, foul God-demeaning oaths,
Raging in self-woe, spasming in wraths,
Trouncing the Holy Name that I should lie struck –
Blasphemous filthy words, glutinous as muck –
My sick self vomiting contempt for the All,
Though, truth, a frightened kicking babe in its shawl.

    My God, my God, all life I’ve prayed to be

    Equal to the gross burden of being,
    Neither strutting upon sorrows recklessly
    Nor cringing from hard-mouthed facts, unseeing;
    But bedded by illness, a winter’s chore,
    In few hours my self-carapace unlimbs
    And I am jointed to a foul-word boor,
    A jelly of resentful heats and megrims.

    In honey time I said, I long to be

    An abject in the Saviour’s house and shun
    The sinners’ tabernacles. And so, He
    In shivering time provided me a portion
    Of His woes, which trustingly embraced avail
    Meaning and homing to the self-mind beast,
    But no, at the first sting of fever’s nail
    I sued for safety and renounced that feast.

Burning in fever, should He renounce my strength

And strip me to my stony self, length for length,
What use then catch-up ingratiating oaths
Obfuscating insults to escape just wraths?
Frankly exiled and from understanding struck,
A writhing mealworm in torment’s sweat and muck,
Frozen by fever, dead-shouldered by the All,
I faint in sickness as in a coffin shawl.

====================

© March 2015