WEBVTT

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The last thing that I'll
read is the most recent thing

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that I've done.

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Some of you have
already heard it.

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The poems are concerned
with the myth of Eden,

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and the sequence is
called "Lamentations."

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The Logos.

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They were both still, the
woman mournful, the man

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branching into her body.

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But God was watching.

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They felt his gold
eye projecting flowers

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on the landscape.

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Who knew what he wanted?

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He was God, and a monster.

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So they waited.

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And the world filled
with His radiance,

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as though he wanted
to be understood.

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Far away, in the void
that He had shaped,

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he turned to his angels.

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Nocturne.

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A forest rose from the earth.

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O pitiful, so needing
God's furious love--

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together they were beasts.

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They lay in the fixed dusk of
His negligence; from the hills,

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wolves came, mechanically
drawn to their human warmth,

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their panic.

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Then the angels saw
how he divided them--

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the man, the woman,
and the woman's body.

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Above the church and
reeds, the leaves

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let go a slow moan of silver.

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The Covenant.

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Out of fear, they
built a dwelling place.

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But a child grew between
them as they slept, as they

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tried to feed themselves.

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They set it on a pile of
leaves, the small discarded

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body wrapped in the
clean skin of an animal.

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Against the black sky they saw
the massive argument of light.

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Sometimes it woke.

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As it reached its
hands they understood

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they were the mother
and father, there

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was no authority above them.

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The Clearing.

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Gradually, over
many years, the fur

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disappeared from their
bodies until they

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stood in the bright light
strange to one another.

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Nothing was as before.

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Their hands trembled,
seeking the familiar.

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Nor could they keep their
eyes from the white flesh

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on which wounds would show
clearly like words on a page.

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And from the meaningless
browns and greens at last God

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arose, His great
shadow darkening

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the sleeping bodies
of His children,

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and leapt into heaven.

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How beautiful it must have
been, the earth, that first time

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seen from the air.

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Thank you.

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[APPLAUSE]

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