What is God, after all ?
If maggots in a dead dog
be but God kissing carrion,
what then is not God ?
And when the war began
it seemed that the poles
of the universe were cracking
and the whole
must go tumbling
into the bottomless pit.
You feel an agony of helplessness.
You can do nothing.
Vaguely you know
the huge powers of the world
are rolling and crashing together,
darkly, clumsily, stupidly,
yet colossal,
so that you’re brushed along,
almost as dust,
helpless,
swirling like dust !
Can you
with your own hands
fight the vast forces of the earth
as they crash and roll,
can you hold the hills in their places ?
You want to fight
with your own warm hands
against the whole.
For what is not
God, after all ?
Rogan Wolf, February 2017
The vast majority of the words of this poem were first written in prose by DH Lawrence. They occur in three separate passages towards the end of Chapter XII of Lawrence’s great novel “The Rainbow.” The war he was referring to was the Boer War. In turn, Lawrence’s reference in the first few lines here to “maggots in a dead dog” comes from “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare, Act II, Scene 2.