The "D" Stood for "Dervish"

God and the Holy Ghost

There is no sinning against God, what does God care about sin!
But there is sinning against the Holy Ghost, since the Holy
Ghost is with us
in the flesh, is part of our consciousness.

The Holy Ghost is the deepest part of our own consciousness
wherein we know ourself for what we are
and know our dependence on the creative beyond.

So if we go counter to our own deepest consciousness
naturally we destroy the most essential self in us,
and once done, there is no remedy, no salvation for this,
nonentity is our portion.

Belief

Forever nameless
Forever unknown
Forever unconceived
Forever unrepresented
yet forever felt in the soul.

Absolute Reverence

I feel absolute reverence to nobody and to nothing human,
neither to persons nor things nor ideas, ideals nor religions nor
institutions,
to these things I feel only respect, and a tinge of reverence
when I see the fluttering of pure life in them.

But to something unseen, unknown, creative
from which I feel I am a derivative
I feel absolute reverence. Say no more!

En Masse

Today, society has sanctified
the sin against the Holy Ghost,
and all are encouraged into the sin
so that all may be lost together, en masse, the great word of our
civilization.

Bells

The Mohammedans say that the sound of bells,
especially big ones, is obscene.

That hard clapper striking in a hard mouth
and resounding after with a long hiss of insistence is obscene.

Yet bells call the Christians to God,
especially clapper bells, hard tongues wagging in hard mouths,
metal hitting on metal, to enforce our attention,
and bring us to God.

The soft thudding of drums,
of finger or fist or soft-skinned sticks upon the stretched
membrane of sound,
sends summons in the old hollows of the sun.

And the accumulated splashing of a gong,
where tissue plunges into bronze with wide wild circles of sound
and leaves off,
belongs to the bamboo thicket, and the drake in the air flying past.

And the sound of a blast through the sea-curved core of a shell
when a black priest blows on a conch,
and the dawn cry from a minaret, God is great,
and the calling of an old red Indian high on the pueblo roof
whose voice flies on, calling like a swan
singing between the sun and the marsh,
on and on, like a dark-faced bird singing alone,
singing to the men below, the fellow tribesmen
who go by without pausing, soft-foot, without listening, yet
they hear:
there are other ways of summons, crying: Listen! Listen!
Come near!

--From The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence
Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1994,
513-516.