To A Friend with A Religious Vocation
Elizabeth Jennings

                                    For C.


Thinking of your vocation, I am filled
With thoughts of my own lack of one. I see
Within myself no wish to breed or build
Or take the three vows ringed by poverty.
      And yet I have a sense,
Vague and inchoate, with no symmetry,
Or purpose. Is it merely a pretence,

A kind of scaffolding which I erect
half out of fear, half out of laziness?
The fitful poems come but can't protect
The empty areas of loneliness.
      You know what you must do,
So that mere breathing is a way to bless.
Dark nights, perhaps, but no grey days for you.

Your vows enfold you. I must make my own;
Not this, now that, each one empirical.
My poems move from feelings not yet known,
And when the poem is written I can feel
      A flash, a moment's peace.
The curtain will be drawn across your grille.
My silences are always enemies.

Yet with the same convictions that you have
(It is but your vocation that I lack),
I must, like you, believe in perfect love.
It is the dark, the dark, that draws me back
      Into a chaos where
Vocations, visions, fail, the will grows slack
And I an stunned by silence everywhere.