Moby Dick

I'm finally getting around to finish Herman Melville's magnum opus and I'm getting a lot out of it. I was clued in to this wonderful Hungarian poet, Mihály Babits, by my Ukrainian-Hungary friend named Emilia Gal. I found a pretty good website with his poems http://www.c3.hu/~eufuzetek/en/eng/14/index.php?mit=babits and in honor of Moby Dick I repost a good one about Jonah and his Whale. Its sort of a microcosm of the deep depression I've been in for the few months, a depression that I just learned might have permanently shrunk my brain. Yikes. But I'm young-I should bounce back!

On that note, I offer up this beautiful prayer to anyone who might stumble upon in a moment of need or otherwise.

JONAH'S PRAYER

Abandoned by my words I'm left alone
or I've become an aimless overflown
drifting river and in my murky mud
I drag the flotsam washed up by the flood:
old idioms exhausted vain pretences
like broken hedgerows signposts maybe fences.
Oh would the Master wisely grant the force
that channels deep, to lead a steady course
toward the sea, and would He fit the rhyme
to fringe my verse perfectly every time
ready for use by me the good disciple,
(for prosody I'd read His holy Bible),
as lazy Jonah shirked to no avail,
and then for three days rotted in the Whale,
I too went down and shared those deadly bays
of hot throbbing pain, but for thirty days,
for thirty years or three hundred, who knows,
to find, before my book will firmly close
and an even blinder and eternal
Whale shall swallow my last departing journal,
my real voice, to marshal every true
word into action, as He gives the cue,
to speak up loud as it is right and fitting
for all to hear (my sickly throat permitting)
until the powers, cosmic and Ninevean
will silence me and send me to oblivion.

Amen.