Antiphon for the Angels

Spirited light! on the edge
of the Presence your yearning
burns in the secret darkness,
O angels, insatiably
into God’s gaze.
Perversity could not touch your beauty;
you are essential joy.
But your lost companion,
angel of the crooked
wings – he sought the summit,
shot down the depths of God
and plummeted past Adam –
that a mud – bound spirit might soar.

--Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), German mystic poet and religious, translated by Barbara Newman, from Women in Praise of the Sacred (ed. by Jane Hirshfield), 2016