“Idiot Psalm 12”
By Scott Cairns

A psalm of Isaak, amid uncommon darkness

O Being both far distant and most near,
             O Lover embracing all unlovable, O Tender
             Tether binding us together, and binding, yea
             and tenderly, Your Person to ourselves,
Being both beyond our ken, and kindred, One
             whose dire energies invest such clay as ours
             with patent animation, O Secret One secreting 
             life anew into our every tissue moribund,
             afresh unto our stale and stalling craft, 
grant in this obscurity a little light.