Cleansing the Temple
-Malcolm Guite
Come to your Temple here with liberation
And overturn these tables of exchange
Restore in me my lost imagination
Begin in me for good, the pure change.
Come as you came, an infant with your mother,
That innocence may cleanse and claim this ground
Come as you came, a boy who sought his father
With questions asked and certain answers found,
Come as you came this day, a man in anger
Unleash the lash that drives a pathway through
Face down for me the fear, the shame, the danger;
Teach me again to whom my love is due.
Break down in me the barricades of death
And tear the veil in two with your last breath
To hear Malcom read his poem, go to
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Raymond Blaze
The Cleansing of the Temple
Dan Doyle
Look at “this brave o;erhanging firmament,
This majestic roof fretted with fire.”*
These wild woodlands with their secret,
Sun-shadowed meadows, where the air
Trembles with many-voiced prayers;
These mighty and broad-backed seas
That come ashore in their endless waves,
Bending their hoary foreheads down
To touch the pebbled strands in humble obeisance;
These desert places, broad with silences
Breathless with heat during the days
And wearing their diadems of numberless stars
From horizon to horizon through the nights;
These tropics, their jungle blanketed hills
Exploding with life and vigorous intent;
Are these not the many rooms of my Father’s Temple,
The dwelling places of the infinite Word?
Are they not the very revelation of
That genesis word, that holy Yes,
That spoke all things into being,
That still breathes Being softly into the now?
Is it not present in all places, at all times?
Why, then, do you sully it so?
Hear me now, and again, my children.
I am that Word, and as the scriptures said,
“Zeal for this house will devour me.”
Why have you turned My sanctuaries into dens?
Why do you no longer hear the Yes I whisper
Within and through all of these places, even now?
“Take this filth you have brought here out.
Stop turning my Father’s House
Into a marketplace, filling its sanctuaries
With this feral din of trade and greed.”
Do you not know that I made each of you
A temple, a vessel of My infinite Yes,
That I wish to dwell in you too?
But you have turned yourselves into
Hovels, jests, paeans to your own egos.
Why have you turned so willfully
Toward that foolish one who cried “No”?
* Hamlet, Act II, scene II
17th C Ethiopian
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