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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Leslie Nelson Jennings

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

God’s House

Leslie Nelson Jennings

WHEN people go to summon God

Unto his earthly throne,

The roof whereunder God may house

Must be a cry in stone.

For God, he will not hear a prayer

That lies against the ground—

How shall the worm lift up to God

So suppliant a sound?

How shall the birds who build so small

Be heard beneath the sky?—

Or those who have no mason’s hand

Be shriven with a cry?

Ten million spires of prayer there be

In Christendom today—

There is no God in Lisser Wood,

Or on the queen’s highway.

And I who cannot square a stone,

Or lodge beneath a roof,

Have heard strange horns on sundown hills

And seen the devil’s hoof!