Poems and a Podcast from The Darkling Psalter

Andy Patton has been working for years on The Darkling Psalter, a multi-volume re-imagining of the 150 psalms. It’s part translation, part meditation, part poetic experiment—an attempt to let these ancient songs speak with fresh urgency. Some of the renditions in The Darkling Psalter are raw and jagged, some tender and quiet, others full of celebration or hope.

The Psalter has always carried the full range of human experience, and this project is about letting that range breathe in fresh language.

The Darkling Psalter Podcast

The project has been written live and in front of an audience of subscribers for years on Substack, and now the Darkling Psalter podcast has provided another avenue for people to experience these psalm renditions.

Here are a few of the more popular renditions with text and audio.

Psalm 19—If you would have light and heat, why are you not more in the sunshine?

The heavens declare the glory of God. 
Every night, the sidelong hip of the Milky Way
Shows itself to you. You see
Backward across miles and years
Along the light of the works of the Almighty.
The earth at your feet is fruitful, wild, and weary.
It pours out words day and night.
The sky and the screaming birds
And all the fullness therein say:
Holy, holy, holy.

The circuit of the sun spans the sky.
If you would have light and heat,
Why are you not more in the sunshine?
If you would see the glory of God,
Why are you always elsewhere?
If you would hear the word in the wind,
Face the stars and wait.

Lord, your word wends your people perfectly;
I wander a lifelong in it. 
Wrap it around my heart to heal.
Speak the long law down directly
And make me wise.
Curve the straight line of your commandments
Over me and make me glad again.
Put the honeycomb of your way
In my mind’s mouth.
Even now my chest, my ribs, these rafters, 
This cathedral, fills with the word that made it,
And your name hushes through the clerestory.

It was always easier to give my life away
Than it was to lay it down.
I see my every fault in holy light;
My hidden thoughts are pearl bright.
But your love is longer than I thought, and stays
Like smoke by day and fire by night.

The stars sway in your holy heaven.
The sun walks its lightlong stretch of sky.
I watch and wait and listen. 

Psalm 28—You are there when the grace gathers around the table at dinner, in the hallowed halls of the real world.

I forget how to begin, Lord.
Wait for me. It’ll take a minute
To find my way from here
To somewhere else.

I’ve been digging ditches all summer, 
Sweating through my graveclothes.
I can feel the beat, beat,
Beat of things going faster—my pulse, 
My pitted prayers, the waltzing clock.
I’ve been patting my pockets since June
And I keep coming up short.
I thought I was only busy,
But I watched these holes getting deeper, 
And realized: one is as good as another.

All day a question runs in my head:
Will you meet me more than halfway,
Or will you drag me off with the wicked? 
I can find their every shortfall in myself. 
I have taken my sin in sips,
While I waited for time to eat away at my resolve.
I have settled for less
And insisted it was worth it.
I have pressed my hands to the wall
In the space between two trains
And hoped my fleeting pleas would pass for prayer.

You hold yourself silent,
But I know you are there.
You show yourself and dance away,
You made your rumor run 
Under the wind, wild as wolves, 
Catching, coy, quicksilver—
Purple in fingers picking blackberries,
Gasping in the azaleas,
Cascading in summer hollyhocks 
Grown head high and higher. You are there 
In the throaty chuckle of ravens brooding 
Like a gang of black toads in the oak trees.
You are there when the grace gathers
Around the table at dinner,
In the hallowed halls of the real world 
Ready to be passed again from hand to hand
In bits of bread and cups of wine.

Lord, help me. Hear me.
Gird yourself and guard me.
Show up, my God, you plodder! 
I cannot give much more than this.
If you are not my help,
I have none. Shepherd, 
Carry me. 

Psalm 33—At his word, the heavens shook and the whole star-raftered cathedral sang his breath back to him.

Shout if you can shout for joy.
Raise a ragged banner of praise upright.
If you can’t raise your head,
Kneel, even beat your breast
And make your throat a keening reed
That whistles when the wind blows.
If there are only empty hands 
In your soul’s pockets,
Raise them up and clap.
God is near and hears,
So thread a slender stripe of praise
Through your needle heart
And stab it into heaven. 

Every word of God’s 
will rise upright and ring.
He never bends nor breaks faith.
The whole earth hums
With his steadfast love like a struck bell.
At his word, the heavens shook
And the whole star-raftered cathedral 
Sang his breath back to him.
He tucks even the deep
Into boxes and marks out 
the storehouses of the wild water. 
Raise up your hope to him in awe.
When he spoke, it was.
When he lifted his hands,
Everything rose.

But the Lord topples every spinning plan,
And holds back every scheme set against him.
Yet his unresting, unhasting love
Hounds you down of its own accord,
Moves in measure like a dancer,
Rouses the broken earth so dead 
Bones rattle and stand.

The Lord sees the whole sweep
Of earth from his throne,
And molds hearts like clay.
No king nor kingdom can raise 
And rally enough strength
To save itself alone. 

But the Lord watches those
Who look to him, wait for him. 
He is an anchorhold, a shield.
He returns hope for hope,
Shakes a glad song down over them,
Sends his raven love 
With bits of bread.

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