First Things RSS Feed - Kevin Hart https://www.firstthings.com/author/kevin-hart en-us Copyright 2025 First Things. All Rights Reserved. ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:57:22 -0500 https://d2201k5v4hmrsv.cloudfront.net/img/favicon-196.png First Things RSS Feed Image https://www.firstthings.com/rss/author/kevin-hart 60 Australia’s Poet https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/05/australias-poet https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2019/05/australias-poet Wed, 01 May 2019 10:15:00 -0400 The Australian poet Les A. Murray (1938–2019) was born in Nabiac on the north coast of New South Wales. He deeply loved this part of the country all his life, and wrote about it extensively. Apart from a period of living in Sydney, and occasional trips overseas, he spent his life in farming country in Bunyah, nor far from where he was born. 

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]]> Prayer https://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/12/prayer https://www.firstthings.com/article/2013/12/prayer Sun, 01 Dec 2013 00:00:00 -0500 It’s not too late, Dark One,
      For you to come
      And have me close
And stay an hour or two,

It’s not too late at all
      For you to slip
      Past fossil light
And quickly touch my hand.

It’s deepest night, Dark One,
      I look straight up
      And won’t be born
Another billion years

If you’re so far away;
      Come closer now
      So that I taste
Your breath: I have been here

On tiptoe all the night,
      And I shall wait
      For you, Dark One,
Till all those years are done.

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]]> You https://www.firstthings.com/article/2008/06/005-you https://www.firstthings.com/article/2008/06/005-you Sun, 01 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400 You come to me in thick old roots of night
While trucks are changing gears, although you kiss
Like a slack orchid tongue in Cairns, and I
Can’t make you out, and so you call to me

At afternoon in a light rain when dreams
Go whirling in Saigon under wet heat
So I can hear your voice, although the wind
Will wrap me in a house made out of grief

Which tells me nothing new, and so you rise
In smells of mint or fine young April light
As though you were a cat with arching back
Who wants attention now, so I must stir

Myself, and listen for you in the blood
That breaks upon my ear, and in odd gaps
Between the jokes my daughters love, for you
Have something big to tell me, people say,

Beneath the sweetest and the lowest note
Of waxwings splashing back from Mexico,
Way down beneath the groaning of night trucks,
And down, way down, beneath the first warm wind.

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]]> Poetics and Power https://www.firstthings.com/article/2008/04/003-poetics-and-power https://www.firstthings.com/article/2008/04/003-poetics-and-power Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400 A Treatise of Civil Power

by Geoffrey Hill

Yale University Press, 64 pages, $16 (paper)

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