A Riot of Images for God

At the  beginning of Hayyim Bialik’s poem “Zohar” (1909),  the poet, compelled to speak that which cannot be spoken, spills forth a world’s worth of ways to point to that elusive reality:

In the midst of my childhood I have been engulfed by loneliness,
And craved all my life for silence and the hidden,
From the body of the world I craved for its light,
Something which I could not fathom murmured like wine inside    me.
I was looking for hiding places.  There I silently observed,
I was like a visionary looking into the eye of the universe.
There my friends were revealed to me, I received their secrets,
And sealed their voices in my mute heart.
My friends, how numerous they were:  any flying bird,
Any tree and its shadow, every bush in the forest,
The face of the meek moon shining into a window,
The darkness of a cellar, the creaking of a gate . . .
The sweet and awesome mixture of light with darkness
In the depth of a well,
Where the echo of my voice and my image are found,
The chiming of a clock, the tooth of a saw grinding within a log,
As if they are pronouncing the forbidden name of God . . .

(in Joseph Dan, The Heart and The Fountain:  An Anthology of Jewish Mystical Experience, 252)