Jericho

You can't see me yet
Seeing takes a long, long time
From the outside in
Measuring each shift and sigh

But as you let your eyes adjust
To the darkness deep within
Sifting through the ash and dust
We are the places that we've been

You can't hear me yet
Listening takes a long, long time
And I've so much to tell
But words die on these lips of mine

But in the stillness you may sense
Every thing I long to say
Unraveling like golden threads
The walls will all come down this way

You don't know me yet
Knowing takes a long, long time
And time is all we have
Never traveling in straight lines

So memorize each turn and twist
Just be careful as you go
For if love is a labyrinth
Then my heart is Jericho

--Mary Chapin Carpenter (1958- ), from the album Ashes and Roses (2012). Chapin's notes about this song can be found here.

Scriptural reference: Joshua 2:1-6:27.

Sea Canes

Half my friends are dead.
I will make you new ones, said earth.
No, give me them back, as they were, instead,
with faults and all, I cried.

Tonight I can snatch their talk
from the faint surf's drone
through the canes, but I cannot walk

on the moonlit leaves of ocean
down that white road alone,
or float with the dreaming motion

of owls leaving earth's load.
O earth, the number of friends you keep
exceeds those left to be loved.

The sea canes by the cliff flash green and silver;
they were the seraph lances of my faith,
but out of what is lost grows something stronger

that has the rational radiance of stone,
enduring moonlight, further than despair,
strong as the wind, that through dividing canes

brings those we love before us, as they were,
with faults and all, not nobler, just there.

-- Derek Wolcott (1930- ) from Selected Poems, 2007

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountain and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

--Mary Oliver (1935- ), from Dream Work, 1986.

No man is an island

No man is an island entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent,
a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
as well as if a promontory were,
as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were;
any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee.

-- John Donne (1572- 1631) English priest and poet, excerpt from Meditation XVII, in Devotions on Divergent Occasions, 1624. Although broken into a poetic form, the full meditation is in prose.


Image: The White Cliffs of Dover, from itv.com

To His Conscience

Can I not sin, but thou wilt be
My private protonotary?
Can I not woo thee to pass by
A short and sweet iniquity?
I’ll cast a mist and cloud upon
My delicate transgression,
So utter dark as that no eye
Shall see the hugg’d impiety.
Gifts blind the wise, and bribes do please,
And wind all other witnesses;
And wilt not thou with gold be tied
To lay thy pen and ink aside,
That in the murk and tongueless night
Wanton I may, and thou not write?
It will not be; and therefore, now,
For times to come I’ll make this vow,
From aberrations to live free,
So I’ll not fear the Judge, or thee.

--Robert Herrick (1591-1674), English priest and lyric poet

For Lent, 1966

It is my Lent to break my Lent,
     To eat when I would fast,
To know when slender strength is spent
     Take shelter from the blast
When I would run with wind and rain,
     To sleep when I would watch.
It is my Lent to smile at pain
     But not ignore its touch.

It is my Lent to listen well
     When I would be alone,
To talk when I would rather dwell
     In silence, turn from none
Who call on me, to try to see
     That what is truly meant
Is not my choice. If Christ's I'd be
     It's thus I'll keep my Lent.

--Madeleine L'Engle (1918-2007)

On a Theme from Julian's Chapter XX

Six hours outstretched in the sun, yes,
hot wood, the nails, blood trickling
into the eyes, yes –
but the thieves on their neighbor crosses
survived till after the soldiers
had come to fracture their legs, or longer.
Why single out the agony? What’s
a mere six hours?
Torture then, torture now,
the same, the pain’s the same,
immemorial branding iron,
electric prod.
Hasn’t a child
dazed in the hospital ward they reserve
for the most abused, known worse?
The air we’re breathing,
these very clouds, ephemeral billows
languid upon the sky’s
moody ocean, we share
with women and men who’ve held out
days and weeks on the rack –
and in the ancient dust of the world
what particles
of the long tormented,
what ashes.
But Julian’s lucid spirit leapt
to the difference:
perceived why no awe could measure
that brief day’s endless length,
why among all the tortured
One only is “King of Grief.”

The oneing, she saw, the oneing
with the Godhead opened Him utterly
to the pain of all minds, all bodies –
sands of the sea, of the desert –
from first beginning
to last day. The great wonder is
that the human cells of His flesh and bone
didn’t explode
when utmost Imagination rose
in that flood of knowledge. Unique
in agony, Infinite strength, Incarnate,
empowered Him to endure
inside of history,
through those hours when he took to Himself
the sum total of anguish and drank
even the lees of that cup:

within the mesh of the web, Himself
woven within it, yet seeing it,
seeing it whole. Every sorrow and desolation
He saw, and sorrowed in kinship.


--Denise Levertov (1923-1997), English/American poet, from Oblique Prayers, 1984
Based on Julian's eighth vision.



Photo: Golgotha, from the Passion side of La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona

The Elixir

Teach me, my God and King,
          In all things Thee to see,
And what I do in anything
          To do it as for Thee.

          Not rudely, as a beast,
          To run into an action;
But still to make Thee prepossest,
          And give it his perfection.

          A man that looks on glass,
          On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
          And then the heav'n espy.

          All may of Thee partake:
          Nothing can be so mean,
Which with his tincture—"for Thy sake"—
          Will not grow bright and clean.

          A servant with this clause
          Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,
          Makes that and th' action fine.

          This is the famous stone
          That turneth all to gold;
For that which God doth touch and own
          Cannot for less be told.


-- George Herbert (1593-1633), English priest and poet, from The Temple (1633)

E Tenebris

Come down, O Christ, and help me! reach thy hand,
For I am drowning in a stormier sea
Than Simon on thy lake of Galilee:
The wine of life is spilt upon the sand,
My heart is as some famine-murdered land,
Whence all good things have perished utterly,
And well I know my soul in Hell must lie
If I this night before God’s throne should stand.
“He sleeps perchance, or rideth to the chase,
Like Baal, when his prophets howled that name
From morn to noon on Carmel’s smitten height.”
Nay, peace, I shall behold before the night, 
The feet of brass, the robe more white than flame,
The wounded hands, the weary human face.

--Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

Playing to the Firmament

There are kids, lots of kids, who put the law inside a circle
As they jump, I hope that you will up and down, up and down
When did you cave into this role that you were cast in
When did dress-up turn to fashion, throw your gown up and down

There's always the sky, let it hear what you're saying
For all that you are saying
And let it take you apart, to the elements of praying
Till we are only playing to the firmament
Till we are only playing to the firmament

In the rain, in the rain, people rush around on cold streets
Here's a shell to hear their heartbeats very loud, very loud
Where's the pain, it's only rain, it's only slowing down a work day
Only singing happy birthday to a crowd, very loud

So turn on the sky, let it hear what you're saying
For all that you are saying
And let it take you apart, to the elements of praying
Till we are only playing to the firmament
Till we are only playing to the firmament

And when did sex get so mean, when did crime get so clean
You know I just can't seem to find the soul in this striving
Why not play to a dream, cause the world is too green
For all this bad driving

What's the rush, dip your brush into this twilight
There are leaves upon the skylight- trace your hand, trace your hand
Old Mr. Red, he shot ahead he shot ahead inside a circle
On a bad day who would you kill? Take a stand, trace your hand

There's always the sky, let it hear what you're saying
For all that you are saying
And let it take you apart, to the elements of praying
Till we are only playing to the firmament
Till we are only playing to the firmament

Dar Williams (1968 - ), from the album The Green World (2012)
This song makes me think of Psalm 19.

Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell

Down through the tomb's inward arch
He has shouldered out into Limbo
to gather them, dazed, from dreamless slumber:
the merciful dead, the prophets,
the innocents just his own age and those
unnumbered others waiting here
unaware, in an endless void he is ending
now, stooping to tug at their hands,
to pull them from their sarcophagi,
dazzled, almost unwilling. Didmas,
neighbor in death, Golgotha dust
still streakedon the dried sweat of his body
no one had washed and anointed, is here,
for sequence is not known in Limbo;
the promise, given from cross to cross
at noon, arches beyond sunset and dawn.
All these he will swiftly lead
to the Paradise road: they are safe.
That done, there must tale place that struggle
no human presumes to picture:
living, dying, descending to rescue the just
from shadow, were lesser travails
than this: to break
through earth and stone of the faithless world
hack to the cold sepulchre, tearstained
stifling shroud; to break from them
back into breath and heartbeat, and walk
the world again, closed into days and weeks again,
wounds of His anguish open, and Spirit
streaming through every cell of flesh
so that if mortal sight could bear
to perceive it, it would be seen
His mortal flesh was lit from within, now,
and aching for home. He must return,
first in Divine patience, and know
hunger again, and give
to humble friends the joy
of giving Him food-- fish and a honeycomb.

Lent 1988

--Denise Levertov (1923-1997), English/American, from Evening Train, 1992,  in The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov, 2013

This Bread I Break

This bread I break was once the oat,
This wine upon a foreign tree
Plunged its fruit;
Man in the day or wind or night
Laid the crops low, broke the grape's joy.

Once in this wine the summer blood
Knocked in the flesh that decked the vine,
Once in this bread
The oat was merry in the wind;
Man broke the sun, pulled the wind down.

This flesh you break, this blood you let
Make desolation in the vein,
Were oat and grape
Born of the sensual root and sap;
My wine you drink, my bread you snap.

--Dylan Thomas (1914-1953), Welsh poet

Photo: the chapel altar at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville

When You Are Old

WHEN you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars. 

-- William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

Lent: Ash Wednesday

Welcome dear feast of Lent: who loves not thee,
He loves not Temperance, or Authority,
But is composed of passion.
The Scriptures bid us fast; the Church says, now:
Give to your Mother, what you would allow
To every Corporation.

* * *

It's true, we cannot reach Christ’s fortieth day;
Yet to go part of that religious way,
Is better than to rest:
We cannot reach our Savior's purity;
Yet are bid, Be holy ev’n as he.
In both let's do our best.

Who goes in the way which Christ has gone,
Is much more sure to meet with him, than one
Who travels the by-ways:
Perhaps my God, though he be far before,
May turn, and take me by the hand, and more
May strengthen my decays.

Yet Lord instruct us to improve our fast
By starving sin and taking such repast
As may our faults control:
That ev’ry man may revel at his door,
Not in his parlor; banqueting the poor,
And among those his soul.

-- George Herbert (1593-1633), English priest and poet, from The Temple (1633)

Lent

Is this a fast, to keep
The larder lean?
And clean
From fat of veals and sheep? 

Is it to quit the dish
Of flesh, yet still
To fill
The platter high with fish?

Is it to fast an hour,
Or ragg’d to go,
Or show
A downcast look and sour?

No; ‘tis a fast to dole
Thy sheaf of wheat,
And meat,
Unto the hungry soul.

It is to fast from strife,
From old debate
And hate;
To circumcise thy life.

To show a heart grief-rent;
To starve thy sin,
Not bin;
And that’s to keep thy Lent.

--Robert Herrick (1591-1674), English priest and lyric poet

Friendship

I think awhile of Love, and while I think, 
Love is to me a world, 
Sole meat and sweetest drink, 
And close connecting link 
Tween heaven and earth. 

I only know it is, not how or why, 
My greatest happiness; 
However hard I try, 
Not if I were to die, 
Can I explain. 

I fain would ask my friend how it can be, 
But when the time arrives, 
Then Love is more lovely 
Than anything to me, 
And so I'm dumb. 

For if the truth were known, Love cannot speak, 
But only thinks and does; 
Though surely out 'twill leak 
Without the help of Greek, 
Or any tongue. 

A man may love the truth and practise it, 
Beauty he may admire, 
And goodness not omit, 
As much as may befit 
To reverence. 

But only when these three together meet, 
As they always incline, 
And make one soul the seat, 
And favorite retreat, 
Of loveliness; 

When under kindred shape, like loves and hates 
And a kindred nature, 
Proclaim us to be mates, 
Exposed to equal fates 
Eternally; 

And each may other help, and service do, 
Drawing Love's bands more tight, 
Service he ne'er shall rue 
While one and one make two, 
And two are one; 

In such case only doth man fully prove 
Fully as man can do, 
What power there is in Love 
His inmost soul to move 
Resistlessly. 

______ 

Two sturdy oaks I mean, which side by side, 
Withstand the winter's storm, 
And spite of wind and tide, 
Grow up the meadow's pride, 
For both are strong 

Above they barely touch, but undermined 
Down to their deepest source, 
Admiring you shall find 
Their roots are intertwined 
Insep'rably. 


-- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks

I am the blossom pressed in a book,
found again after two hundred years. . . .

I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper. . . . 

When the young girl who starves
sits down to a table
she will sit beside me. . . . 

I am food on the prisoner's plate. . . . 

I am water rushing to the wellhead, 
filling the pitcher until it spills. . . . 

I am the patient gardener
of the dry and weedy garden. . . .


I am the stone step,
the latch, and the working hinge. . . . 

I am the heart contracted by joy. . .
the longest hair, white
before the rest. . . . 

I am there in the basket of fruit 
presented to the widow. . . .

I am the musk rose opening 
unattended, the fern on the boggy summit. . . . 

I am the one whose love
overcomes you, already with you
when you think to call my name. . . 


-- Jane Kenyon (1947-1995), from The Iowa Review, 12:2 (1981)

Not By Might Nor By Power

O Lord, may we never become complacent, faltering in our effort to build a world of peace for Your children. Let the nations know and understand that justice and right are better than conquest and dominion; may they come to see that it is not by might nor by power, but by Your spirit, that life prevails.

--Shabbat prayer from Gates of Prayer: The New Union Prayer Book, Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1975, p. 233.

Sonnet 104 (To Me, Fair Friend, You Can Never Be Old)

To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I eyed,
Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold 
Have from the forests shook three summers’ pride,
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned
In process of the seasons have I seen, Three
April perfumes in three hot Junes burned,
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.
Ah, yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand,
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived; 
So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,
Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceived:
For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred:
Ere you were born was beauty’s summer dead.


-- William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

Annunciation: The Birth of Kool

Annunciation: The Birth of Kool, by Jack Anderson, American

To a Friend

I ask but one thing of you, only one, 
That always you will be my dream of you; 
That never shall I wake to find untrue 
All this I have believed and rested on, 
Forever vanished, like a vision gone 
Out into the night. Alas, how few 
There are who strike in us a chord we knew 
Existed, but so seldom heard its tone 
We tremble at the half-forgotten sound. 
The world is full of rude awakenings 
And heaven-born castles shattered to the ground, 
Yet still our human longing vainly clings 
To a belief in beauty through all wrongs. 
O stay your hand, and leave my heart its songs! 

-- Amy Lowell (1874-1925), from A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass (1912)

Let Evening Come

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles 
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

-- Jane Kenyon (1947-1995). from Let Evening Come (1990)

Thinking of a Friend at Night

In this evil year, autumn comes early...
I walk by night in the field, alone, the rain clatters,
The wind on my hat...And you? And you, my friend? 

You are standing- maybe- and seeing the sickle moon
Move in a small arc over the forests
And bivouac fire, red in the black valley.
You are lying- maybe- in a straw field and sleeping
And dew falls cold on your forehead and battle jacket.

It's possible tonight you're on horseback,
The farthest outpost, peering along, with a gun in your fist,
Smiling, whispering, to your exhausted horse.
Maybe- I keep imagining- you are spending the night
As a guest in a strange castle with a park
And writing a letter by candlelight, and tapping
On the piano keys by the window,
Groping for a sound...

- And maybe
You are already silent, already dead, and the day
Will shine no longer into your beloved
Serious eyes, and your beloved brown hand hangs wilted,
And your white forehead split open- Oh, if only,
If only, just once, that last day, I had shown you, told you
Something of my love, that was too timid to speak! 

But you know me, you know...and, smiling, you nod
Tonight in front of your strange castle,
And you nod to your horse in the drenched forest,
And you nod to your sleep to your harsh clutter of straw,
And think about me, and smile.
And maybe,
Maybe some day you will come back from the war,
and take a walk with me some evening,
And somebody will talk about Longwy, Luttich, Dammerkirch,
And smile gravely, and everything will be as before,
And no one will speak a word of his worry,
Of his worry and tenderness by night in the field,
Of his love. And with a single joke
You will frighten away the worry, the war, the uneasy nights,
The summer lightning of shy human friendship,
Into the cool past that will never come back.

-- Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), from Poems, 1970  (translated by James Wright)


Photo: Lt. Col Hermann Hesse of the Cheshire Regiment in World War I from https://diversenarratives.com/2015/01/27/lt-colonel-hermann-hesse/

For the interim time

When near the end of day, life has drained
Out of light, and it is too soon
For the mind of night to have darkened things,

No place looks like itself, loss of outline
Makes everything look strangely in-between,
Unsure of what has been, or what might come. 

In this wan light, even trees seem groundless.
In a while it will be night, but nothing
Here seems TO believe the relief of dark.

You are in this time of the interim
Where everything seems withheld.

The path you took to get here has washed out;
The way forward is still concealed from you.

"The old is not old enough to have died away;
The new is still too young to be born."

You cannot lay claim to anything;
In this place of dusk,
Your eyes are blurred;
And there is no mirror.

Everyone else has lost sight of your heart
And you can see nowhere to put your trust;
You know you have to make your own way through.

As far as you can, hold your confidence.
Do not allow your confusion to squander
This call which is loosening
Your roots in false ground,
That you might come free
From all you have outgrown.

What is being transfigured here is your mind,
And it is difficult and slow to become new.
The more faithfully you can endure here,
The more refined your heart will become
For your arrival in the new dawn.

-- John O'Donohue (1956-2008), from To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings, 2008

Evening Winter light at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville

Hearth Keeper Prayer

Brigid of the Mantle, encompass us,
Lady of the Lambs, protect us,
Keeper of the Hearth, kindle us.
Beneath your mantle, gather us,
And restore us to memory.
Mothers of our mother, Foremothers strong.
Guide our hands in yours,
Remind us how to kindle the hearth.
To keep it bright, to preserve the flame.
Your hands upon ours, Our hands within yours,
To kindle the light, Both day and night.
The Mantle of Brigid about us,
The Memory of Brigid within us,
The Protection of Brigid keeping us
From harm, from ignorance, from heartlessness.
This day and night,
From dawn till dark,
From dark till dawn.

-- From the Order of St. Brigid of Kildare (453-525), one of the patron saints of Ireland. Her feast day is today, February 1.