Friday, January 23, 2009

Carol sent me this

Ad Coelum

At the muezzin's call for prayer,
The kneeling faithful thronged the square,
And on Pushkara's lofty height
The dark priest chanted Brahma's might.
Amid a monastery's weeds
And old Franciscan told his beads;
While to the synagogue there came
A Jew to praise Jehovah's name.
The one great God looked down and smiled
And counted each His loving child;
For Turk and Brahmin, monk and Jew
Had reached Him through the gods they knew.

--Harry Romaine, "Munsey's Magazine", Jan. 1895

1 comment:

Carol M. Clarke said...

I had to look up muezzin and Pushkara to understand the poem better. Barb and I had gotten out poetry books to look for Alexander Pope because there was a "quote of the day" by him. In the process, Barb found this poem in our old poetry books.. We thought it spoke as well today as in 1895. Then I looked up the author Harry Romaine and found out that he had written "fillers" for Munsey's Magazine for years. This was probably one of them.