Interim

- What do I say?
God! God! - God pity me! Am I gone mad
That I should spit upon a rosary?
Am I become so shrunken? Would to God
I too might feel that frenzied faith whose touch
Makes temporal the most enduring grief;
Though it must walk a while, as is its wont,
With wild lamenting! Would I too might weep
Where weeps the world and hangs its piteous wreaths
For its new dead! Not Truth, but Faith, it is
That keeps the world alive. If all at once
Faith were to slacken, - that unconscious faith
Which must, I know, yet be the corner-stone
Of all believing, - birds now flying fearless
Across would drop in terror to the earth;
Fishes would drown; and the all-governing reigns
Would tangle in the frantic hands of God
And the worlds gallop headlong to destruction!

-Excerpt from Interim by Edna St. Vincent Millay-