News

He's too old, this child with the round, small
face, the serious eyes, in a world
that is too old--wars and waves,
hunger and holocaust, fire and flood and blood--
and he asks me this: were there fewer disasters
when I was a child?
I think not, but I say I paid less attention.

And what of now: I am like a dryad,
more concerned with whether there will be rain
to water my roots, with stretching my bare arms
in the warm sun, with keeping the woodcutter's ax
far from my tree,
as if the world of man were somehow
distant and disconnected from me
and all it takes is not
reading the news.

Pentecost Week: Wednesday

If I were obtuse to signs and symbols,

You would make me a mystic yet,

Eager eyes fixed to the skies.

Pentecost week:

Yesterday there was a cloud in my path

For all appearances

Exactly like a dove

Just lifting off in flight--

Or perhaps alighting on some branch,

A deep, fluttering calm,

And I wondered.

Today, sprinkles of sweet rain from heaven.

And lest you say it is spring,

And rain no great thing for May,

I tell you the rain fell upon the desert,

Upon thirsty ground,

Upon weary, haggard land,

Washing it clean,
Quenching deep-rooted thirst.

Epiphany

Morning in January:

Eastern sky gleams lemon-yellow

Anticipating dawn.

Small children spill, splash,

Sleepily,

From vans and cars.

Teachers wrap chilled fingers round

Hot coffee mugs, sip, sweep straggling cobwebs

From corners of drowsy minds.

Seventy starlings swing,

Strung across telephone wires,

Softly sing suspense.

Three stars shimmer faintly,

Fade, wink out,

Obscured by deepening light.

Sunrise

Streams over horizon,

Gold fire resplendent.

Sparrows spiral, whirl,

Children laugh, skip,

City awake.

Desert Morning

Sun is enthroned on airy castle of clouds,
Light cascading in brilliant columns to earth.

Drops of rain splash down;
The low, shrub-like trees
Raise up leafy arms.

I, whose existence is not contingent
On these brief scattered raindrops,
Raise my arms, too,
As though my life depended on it.

Phoenix by Moonlight: On the Last of August

Desert night--

   moon alights on still palms;

City lights

   cannot reach the depths

   of the expanse but yet

   pale stars.

The monsoons have come and gone;

   there is no poetry of rain

   and the air is still--

Still, but devoid of silence.

   Men sit on their porches

   sweating and smoking,

   complacent and cursing.

The road roars

    of constant traffic.

The smoke has fouled the air;

   the city has drowned the night.

No birds, no wildlife--

    only somewhere a cicada drones.

Phoenix, I have seen thee burn,

   flames into ash

in glory of red skies

   and streaming faces.

Can I hope for thee to rise,

   to take flight?

Dare I hope to see

   emerging

Life?

Haze

Summer light sharpens lines,
Intensifies colors to dazzle aching eyes,
Dispel illusions of nuance.

Mornings of sun, blinding afternoons
Blur into gentle monotony of days
While the park swings remain
Suspended motionless.

Invariably, you and I,
Hiding from afternoon,
Clothe poverty in rich existence--
From rice, beans, white pasta
We find refreshment
In ice cream and cheap beer;
Usurp the smells of sweat and chlorine
With fresh-brewed coffee.

Let us build days for ourselves
Out of old books, rich music,
And the world that is too hot to touch
Will infuse us with its life.

When July is gracious
We will delight
In the heavy-sweet rain smell;
When it is cruel
There will be a world for us still.

Eucharist

O for child-joy,
  solemnly taking the Mysteries of grace
in both hands
to eat and drink carefully of God's provision--
     abstracts she can't understand like
     holiness and redemption--
then to skip away, jubilant
  fluttering
like some small bird
  that knows its freedom and
     dependence.

In the Cleft of the Rock: Of Mystics and Mountains

My second hike since moving to Arizona:

My asthmatic Midwest lungs aren’t used to the mountain-desert air.  So I wheeze along in the elation of the climb and the frustration of breathing.  I find hiding places off the path to catch my breath, read a little; and my mind is full of phrases and lines from poetry and Scripture which contain imagery matching the scenery around me.

Humankind should ponder God…

recognize God’s wonders and signs.

Let these signs and wonders be

the firmament on which to build,

            so as not to be shaken by fear,

            or distracted from the love of God.

                                                            Hildegard of Bingen

Dillard couldn’t understand why mystics sought God on mountaintops, knowing He is fearsome and powerful.  She declared she would hide in a cave into which only slivers of God could shine in as light through the cracks.  I think I understand the mystics’ approach more than hers.

Gravity

Truly we speak of the Curse
  As the Fall;
Man has been bound and grasped
  By gravity ever since.

The body grows in shape and mass;
  Each passing year gravity gains force.
The accumulation of years
  Bends the shoulders to the earth.

The human heart finds sorrow
  And trouble in time perennial
Till it fills over-full and ever-heavy
  Weighing the soul ever lower.

Time and age are merely formality—
  We are forever pressed into the earth's embrace.

Fragility

I am the pond in the early morning sun

Slant of rays against ice.
Step on the borders
Where water meets grass
And the ice is thick.
This you know and trust
Because I am reliable
And I like to have you there.
But be careful of the center:
The water is deep beyond knowing,
And the ice grows thin.
The waters move,
The waters still.
You are welcome here:
Only please remember
The waters exist.
Calm, I am a pond
Glinting with ice in morning sun.

Handel's Harpsichord

Can music be specific to any one particular season? Perhaps and perhaps not.  Yet Vivaldi seemed to think so, and Handel's Harpsichord Suite No.2 in F major seemed to me to appropriately represent Winter's fragile finery.


In a rush of harpsichord joy
Are scales of flowing snowflakes,
Trills of brave morning birdsong.

Brief rests between movements
Are the pauses between puffs of white breath;
Chords the crunch of footfall.

Staccato notes are surely
Bare tree-tips reaching thin point
Perplexed in persistent effort
To pierce the low-hanging sky.

Stark brittle beauty
The cold stream singing notes
Of fumbling round ice and rough white-patched rocks.

Thin of ice and harpsichord sounds,
Gracing sweep of covered land:
Enamor
            open eyes and ears.

Snowstorm

Thick empty white sky hanging

   Blank like the face of a vacant stranger

Endless white ground stretching and soaring

  Mounting upward forward backward

     (Deceptively spotless seagull arcs)

Both dissolving, disintegrating

   Into a swirling middle

Shreds from above and below frantically

   Now triumphantly

       (like an eraser scrub the last

        bits of pencil or color scratch markings)

   Gaining inch by foot

Overcoming the space in between.

Whitewashed

O Winter,

when you bleached the color

out of every last inch of the world,

whitewashing walls and windows

to your windy heart's content,

could you not have left

a little more

within my soul?

Words

Do we not know,
   you and I,
That we hold the power of the gods
   and not of men?
That in our words are the powers
   of all life and death—

That we speak these words
   and mostly
that rambling idle nonsense
   we think to be
     harmlessly
        in between.

And Death, too
  wears many faces.

Winter Psalm

Winter has unfolded
   in crisp, clean lines
Sharp like the telephone wires
   and bare branches against the sky,
Sharp like the cold stars
   before dawn.

And the world moves and lives on
   in all the bustling human ways,
And in flocks of birds and burning wind.

O sing, you people, and dance;
   hearken, and be still.

For the Lord our God
   who waits for us in stillness
Is a God of stillness but not static;
   He who created our bones to run and dance
Is in the movement as well as the quiet.

His wind burns our hearts like fire,
   with joy, like flocks of birds,
Enduring like the trees
   silent against the sky,
Like stars in the deep before dawn.

A Couple Word-Plays

Hebrews 4

In spite
Of our spite
He is
Respite.



Eternal Mysteries

Inspire
Expire
Holy Fire

Church spire
Funeral pyre
Resurrection higher.

Plans, part two: Dreams in Open Hands

A long time ago, nearly four years ago now, God asked me to relinquish my plans for my life, however grand and enthralling, and trust His, whatever they may be.  I wrote about it here, Plans, part one, and began the long process of obeying.

Mainly for me at the time, it meant giving up my dream of getting married.  "Can you trust that I can still fulfill you and provide for you if you were to remain single?" God asked me.  My first response, as I wrote about it in the poem, was not so certain.  My hands were closed tightly around my plans, I could see them, and I liked them.  God's plans belonged to the scary unknown.

But with some wrestling over the course of a semester or so, I gave up my dreams. I learned to say "if I get married" instead of "when I get married," and learned to be careful about participating, if at all, in the many conversations college girls will have in dorms in which they plan their weddings and pick out names for their children.  (Most of the said girls in these conversations at the time didn't even have boyfriends, which made them particularly unconstructive.)  I assumed, for all intents and purposes, that I would be single for the rest of my life.  It was hard, and it was liberating.

And God smiled at my open hands and, after many unexpected plot twists, I'm getting married this April to a wonderful man of God who loves books and ministry as much as I do and is already close with my family.  So I am learning what it means to dream again, but together, and with open hands.  This too is a process, and has been over the past few years.

So here is the poem of that process, a fitting response and second part to my old "Plans" sketch, a sonnet for my Jonathan and I and the journey before us.


We whispered dreams, you and I:
And so we shall again and again
By candles or cold front stoops.
Yet what are our tremulous dreams but dust?
What are dreams ever but dust, fragile,
     Spun to catch the light like gold?

I am of dust and you are of dust
And He remembers our form--
If we are ignoble it is not of our wind-blown origins.
Spirit is wind-breathing life:
     Illuminate, ennervate, beautify, penetrate.

Spirit-wind, blow into our dreams
Life and hope and fire; illuminate
     Our dust into something more like life or gold.


Allison

Death's Last Stand

This is Death's last lonely stand,

Outpost of pain in the most verdant land:
That Love's deepest unearthly power
Of being faithfully present to all places and men;
The gift of un-self though adversity tower;
Of seeking to better with heart, hands, mind, and then—
To find in oneself a piece of that place, that friend
That growth, separation, or their pain can rend
Into suffering as Love, which love itself cannot mend.

To love truly is fierce joy and pain as one—
Not to love, Death has certainly won—
Nay, Love's last triumph in sore human soul
Shall be Death's last chain broken,

Our hearts made more whole.

Fall Poetry: Frost + St. Vincent Millay

Autumn Chant

                       Edna St. Vincent Millay

Now the autumn shudders

  In the rose's root.

Far and wide the ladders

  Lean among the fruit.

Now the autumn clambers

  Up the trellised frame,

And the rose remembers

  The dust from which it came.

The Form Unformed

That which was from the beginning,

The Form unformed,

Stretched out hand and voice,

Forming thus the formless

Into beauty and life.

That which was formed from formlessness

Committed treason against the Form unformed,

Bethinking itself to be eternal Form unformed.

And that which was formed

Was eternally deformed.

That which was made,

Thought the eternal Form unformed,

Ought to be unmade.

But he wished not to suffer

The destruction to un-form that which was once lovely.

That which was from the beginning,

Eternal Form unformed,

For our sake became one formed.

That which was deformed sought to deform him—

Sought in fact to render him formless.

That which from the beginning loved those he formed

Loved also those now deformed.

Giving himself up unto them,

The Form was unformed and re-formed,

Having no deformity in him.

That which was from the beginning,

The Form unformed, formed and re-formed,

So loved us that, while we were yet deformed

He suffered that we might be, with him,

Eternally transformed.