How's This for Poetry?

Much has been made of poetry on this blog lately, which is meet and right and maybe not technically a bounden duty, but absolutely a holy gift. Evidence of that in a second.

We knocked off church this morning because we had house guests, meaning I snuck away late in the afternoon to attend the 5pm Eucharist. When the local college is not in session this service ceases to be under the purview of campus ministry and becomes this sort of catch-all, a motley little collection of the faithful, the crowd-shy, those who for one reason or another couldn't make it in the morning and couldn't make it through the week without this touchstone.

So there we were, the six of us, and I got to be a lay reader. And by the luck of the draw I was given the gift of this, which is absolutely a poem-- a little hymn weaving together the works of the Father and the wonders of creation in an entirely female voice.

I can't parse that out, really. I'm completely unqualified beyond some vague notion that Wisdom is referred to as a woman a few different times in Proverbs, and not always favorably. Here, though, the voice is striking and confident and calls to mind the beginning of the Gospel of John, which places Christ there in the beginning of everything. Here, Wisdom states that she was there, too.

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Does not wisdom call,
and does not understanding raise her voice?
On the heights, beside the way,
at the crossroads she takes her stand;
beside the gates in front of the town,
at the entrance of the portals she cries out:
"To you, O people, I call,
and my cry is to all that live.
The LORD created me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of long ago.
Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
When there were no depths I was brought forth,
when there were no springs abounding with water.
Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth--
when he had not yet made earth and fields,
or the world's first bits of soil.
When he established the heavens, I was there,
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
then I was beside him, like a master worker;
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race."

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31