Sustenance
If you starve anything,
A race, a flower, a fever,
Fear it will rise and cling
To you, for you can never
Kill something true for good
By cutting off its food.
I knew a sinner once,
God was his meat and drink.
He wouldn’t look askance
At Christ, or say he shrank
Because the world had given
No saints lately to heaven.
from Madonna of the Cello, by Robert Bagg
Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961
Available on the Internet Archive: Link
This is one in a series of neglected poems taken from the Internet Archive.