On the Parables of the Mustard Seed

Who ever saw the mustard-plant,
wayside weed or tended crop,
grow tall as a shrub, let alone a tree, a treeful
of shade and nests and songs?
Acres of yellow,
not a bird of the air in sight.

No. He who knew
the west wind brings
the rain, the south wind
thunder, who walked the field-paths
running His hand along wheatstems to glean
those intimate milky kernels, good
to break on the tongue,

was talking of miracle, the seed
within us, so small
we take it for worthless, a mustard-seed, dust,
nothing.
                Glib generations mistake
the metaphor, not looking at fields and trees,
not noticing paradox. Mountains
remain unmoved.

Faith is rare, He must have been saying,
prodigious, unique –
one infinitesimal grain divided
like loaves and fishes,

as if from a mustard-seed
a great shade-tree grew. That rare,
that strange: the kingdom

                                                a tree. The soul
a bird. A great concourse of birds
at home there, wings among yellow flowers.

The waiting
kingdom of faith, the seed
waiting to be sown.

--Denise Levertov (1923-1997) Anglo-American poet, daughter of a Hasidic father who became an Anglican priest; his daughter was an agnostic, but converted to Catholicism later in life.

Image: James B. Janknegt, World's Smallest Seed

Scriptural reference: Proper 12A, Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52; Proper 21C, Luke 17:5-10; 

Rachel

When Jacob and Rachel met for the first time,
He bowed to her like a humble wayfarer.
The herds were raising hot dust to the skies,
The little well's mouth was covered by a boulder.
He rolled the old boulder away from the well
And watered the flock with clean water himself.

Yet sweet little sadness crept into his heart
With each passing day growing stronger.
To wed her he bargained to toil seven years
As shepherd for her artful father.
Oh, Rachel! To the captive of love in his eyes
The seven years seemed as a few dazzling days.

Yet Laban was thirsty for silver, and wise,
And mercy he didn’t espouse,
Assuming forgiveness for all kind of lies…
As long as they serve his own house.
He took homely Leah with his sure hand
And led her to Jacob in his wedding tent.

A sultry night reigns over high desert sky
And spreads misty dews in the morning,
While pulling her braids in despair all that night
The younger of sisters is moaning,
Sends curses to Leah and God for her doom
Imploring the angel of death to come soon.

As Jacob is dreaming the sweetest of dreams:
The clear well spring in the valley
And Rachel's eyes happily looking at him
Her beautiful voice singing softly:
O, weren't you kissing me, Jacob, with love
And calling me always your black turtledove?

--Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966), great Russian poet, anti-Stalinist, and translator

Image: Jacob and Rachel at the Well, 19th century, Florence.

From Purgatorio 27

A little glimpse of sky was seen above;
Yet by that little I beheld the stars
In magnitude and rustle shining forth
With more than wonted glory. As I lay,
Gazing on them, and in that fit of musing,
Sleep overcame me, sleep, that bringeth oft
Tidings of future hap. About the hour,
As I believe, when Venus from the east
First lighten’d on the mountain, she whose orb
Seems always glowing with the fire of love,
A lady young and beautiful, I dream’d,
Was passing o’er a lea; and, as she came,
Methought I saw her ever and anon
Bending to cull the flowers; and thus she sang:
“Know ye, whoever of my name would ask,
That I am Leah: for my brow to weave
A garland, these fair hands unwearied ply.
To please me at the crystal mirror, here
I deck me. But my sister Rachel, she
Before her glass abides the livelong day,
Her radiant eyes beholding, charm’d no less,
Than I with this delightful task. Her joy
In contemplation, as in labour mine.”

--Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Italian master poet of the Medieval period, called the "father of the Italian language" for his use of the vernacular rather than Latin,  from book 2 of The Divine Comedy

Here, There Are Blueberries

When I see the bright clouds, a sky empty of moon and stars,
I wonder what I am, that anyone should note me.

Here there are blueberries, what should I fear?
Here there is bread in thick slices, of whom should I be afraid?

Under the swelling clouds, we spread our blankets.
Here in this meadow, we open our baskets

to unpack blueberries, whole bowls of them,
berries not by the work of our hands, berries not by the work of our fingers.

what taste the bright world has, whole fields
without wires, the blackened moss, the clouds

swelling at the edges of the meadow. And for this,
I did nothing, not even wonder.

You must live for something, they say.
People don’t live just to keep on living.

But here is the quince tree, a sky bright and empty.
Here there are blueberries, there is no need to note me.

-- Mary Szybist (1970- ), from Incarnadine (Graywolf Press, 2013).

Photo not mine, from shutterstock.

For What Binds Us

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest—

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

--Jane Hirshfield (1953- ), American poet, translator, and essayist, from Of Gravity & Angels, 1988

Scriptural reference: Romans 18:12-25

A Time of Bees

Love is never strong enough to find the words befitting it.
                                                                             CAMUS


All day my husband pounds on the upstairs porch.
Screeches and grunts of wood as the wall is opened
keep the whole house tormented. He is trying to reach
the bees, he is after bees. This is the climax, an end
to two summers of small operations with sprays and ladders.

Last June on the porch floor I found them dead,
a sprinkle of dusty bugs, and next day a still worse
death, until, like falling in love, bee-haunted,
I swept up bigger and bigger loads of some hatch,
I thought, sickened, and sickening me, from what origin?

My life centered on bees, all floors were suspect. The search
was hopeless. Windows were shut. I never find
where anything comes from. But in June my husband’s fierce
sallies began, inspections, cracks located
and sealed, insecticides shot; outside, the bees’ course

watched, charted; books on bees read.
I tell you I swept up bodies every day on the porch.
Then they’d stop, the problem was solved; then they were there again,
as the feelings make themselves known again, as they beseech
sleepers who live innocently in will and mind.

It is no surprise to those who walk with their tigers
that the bees were back, no surprise to me. But they had
left themselves so lack-luster, their black and gold furs
so deathly faded. Gray bugs that the broom hunted
were like a thousand little stops when some great lurch

of heart takes place, or a great shift of season.
November it came to an end. No bees. And I could watch
the floor, clean and cool, and, from windows, the cold land.
But this spring the thing began again, and his curse
went upstairs again, and his tinkering and reasoning and pride.

It is the man who takes hold. I lived from bees, but his force
went out after bees and found them in the wall where they hid.
And now in July he is tearing out the wall, and each
board ripped brings them closer to his hunting hand.
It is quiet, has been quiet for a while. He calls me, and I march

from a dream of bees to see them, winged and unwinged,
such a mess of interrupted life dumped on newspapers—
dirty clots of grubs, sawdust, stuck fliers, all smeared
together with old honey, they writhe, some of them, but who cares?
They go to the garbage, it is over, everything has been said.

But there is more. Wouldn’t you think the bees had suffered
enough? This evening we go to a party, the breeze
dies, late, we are sticky in our old friendships and light-headed.
We tell our funny story about the bees.
At two in the morning we come home, and a friend,

a scientist, comes with us, in his car. We’re going to save
the idea of the thing, a hundred bees, if we can find
so many unrotted, still warm but harmless, and leave
the rest. We hope that the neighbors are safe in bed,
taking no note of these private catastrophes.

He wants an enzyme in the flight-wing muscle. Not a bad
thing to look into. In the night we rattle and raise
the lid of the garbage can. Flashlights in hand,
we open newspapers, and the men reach in a salve
of happenings. I can’t touch it. I hate the self-examined

who’ve killed the self. The dead are darker, but the others have
moved in the ooze toward the next moment. My God
one half-worm gets its wings right before our eyes.
Searching fingers sort and lay bare, they need
the idea of bees—and yet, under their touch, the craze

for life gets stronger in the squirming, whitish kind.
The men do it. Making a claim on the future, as love
makes a claim on the future, grasping. And I, underhand,
I feel it start, a terrible, lifelong heave
taking direction. Unpleading, the men prod

till all that grubby softness wants to give, to give.


-- Mona Van Duyn (1921-2004), American poet, US Poet Laureate 1992, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and resident of University City, MO, from If It Be Not I: Collected Poems 1959-1982

God is In the Roses

God is in the roses
The petals and the thorns
Storms out on the oceans
The souls who will be born
And every drop of rain that falls
Falls for those who mourn
God is in the roses
And the thorns

The sun is on the cemetery
Leaves are on the stones
There never was a place on earth
That felt so much like home
We're falling like the velvet petals
We're bleeding and we're torn
But God is in the roses
And the thorns

I love you like a brother
A father and a son
It may not last forever
But it never will be done
My whole world fits inside the moment
I saw you be re-born
God is in the roses
And that day was filled with roses
God is in the roses
And the thorns

--Rosanne Cash (1955- ), American singer-songwriter and author, from the album Black Cadillac, 2006

Aftermath

When the summer fields are mown,
When the birds are fledged and flown,
And the dry leaves strew the path;
With the falling of the snow,
With the cawing of the crow,
Once again the fields we mow
And gather in the aftermath.

Not the sweet, new grass with flowers
Is this harvesting of ours;
Not the upland clover bloom;
But the rowen mixed with weeds,
Tangled tufts from marsh and meads,
Where the poppy drops its seeds
In the silence and the gloom.

--Henry Wordsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), American poet, essayist, translator, and teacher

Scripture reference: Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

Weeds

My emerald legions, how tall you have grown:
so many. With what supernatural speed

you overlord the weakest in the garden—
frizzled hydrangeas, sere mint, sun-starved basil.

Tousle-headed, you can see the sky
above the cowering, defeated plots.

This is your day of triumph: Eager sugars
rise up through your ramifying stalks.

And I allowed it. My cool inattention
found good reasons to look the other way,

since all that grows is good, or so I thought.
How soon would height recall high thoughts, and yet,

if I uproot you now, how I would miss you.
Sweet knotgrass, heartsick briar, purple thistle.

Even tilled up, the garden wouldn’t be
as it was when I played here years ago

and my grandmother warned me, since I’d gotten
lanky, not to grow too fast. She lived

to be a hundred, early years wiped clean
from her memory, all except for this:

a vague lightness, as though a sense of wings
lifted her above the loamy ground,

and all she thought of, as the wind upheld her,
was of falling, how tenuous her flight.

Or so I imagine. Though half her age,
I, too, can’t quite remember what it was like

to feel light-footed, open to the sun,
without the clogging stems elbowing out

what I had meant when I first planted here:
larkspur, geraniums, cilantro, lime.

--David Yezzi (1966- ), American poet, editor, librettist, and teacher

Blight

HARD seeds of hate I planted
That should by now be grown,—

Rough stalks, and from thick stamens
A poisonous pollen blown,
And odors rank, unbreathable,
From dark corollas thrown!

At dawn from my damp garden
I shook the chilly dew;
The thin boughs locked behind me
That sprang to let me through, 
The blossoms slept,— I sought a place
Where nothing lovely grew.

And there, when day was breaking,
I knelt and looked around:
The light was near, the silence
Was palpitant with sound;
I drew my hate from out my breast
And thrust it in the ground.

Oh, ye so fiercely tended,
Ye little seeds of hate!
I bent above your growing
Early and noon and late,
Yet are ye drooped and pitiful,—
I cannot rear ye straight!

The sun seeks out my garden,
No nook is left in shade,
No mist nor mold nor mildew
Endures on any blade,
Sweet rain slants under every bough:
Ye falter, and ye fade.

--Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), American poet

The Dimensions of the Milky Way

Behind the men’s dorm
at dusk on a late May evening,
Carver lowers the paper
and watches the light change.
He tries to see earth
across a distance
of twenty-five thousand light-years,
from the center of the Milky Way:
a grain of pollen, a spore
of galactic dust.
He looks around:
that shagbark, those swallows,
the fireflies, that blasted mosquito:
this beautiful world.
A hundred billion stars
in a roughly spherical flattened disc
with a radius of one hundred light-years.
Imagine that.
He catches a falling star.
Well, Lord, this infinitesimal speck
could fill the universe with praise.


--Marilyn Nelson (1946- ), African American poet and translator, Poet Laureate of Connecticut

Good Ground

I love your simple story of the sower,

With all its close attention to the soil,

Its movement from the knowledge to the knower,

Its take on the tenacity of toil.


I feel the fall of seed a sower scatters,

So equally available to all,

Your story takes me straight to all that matters,

Yet understands the reasons why I fall.


Oh deepen me where I am thin and shallow,

Uproot in me the thistle and the thorn,

Keep far from me that swiftly snatching shadow,

That seizes on your seed to mock and scorn.


O break me open, Jesus, set me free,

Then find and keep your own good ground in me.

-- Malcom Guite (1954-), English priest, poet, musician, and theologian

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Ten Thousand Idiots

It is always a danger 

To the aspirant
On the
Path

When one begins 

To believe and 

Act

As if the ten thousand idiots 

Who so long ruled
And lived
Inside

Have all packed their bags 

And skipped town
Or
Died.

-- Hafiz of Shiraz (1310-1390), Sufi, one of the greatest Persian lyric poets

Saints Bowing in the Mountains

Do you know how beautiful you are? 

I think not, my dear.

For as you talk of God,
I see great parades with wildly colorful bands 

Streaming from your mind and heart, 

Carrying wonderful and secret messages
To every corner of this world.

I see saints bowing in the mountains 

Hundreds of miles away
To the wonder of sounds
That break into light

From your most common words.

Speak to me of your mother, 

Your cousins and your friends.

Tell me of squirrels and birds you know. 

Awaken your legion of nightingales - 

Let them soar wild and free in the sky

And begin to sing to God. 

Let's all begin to sing to God!

Do you know how beautiful you are? 

I think not, my dear,

Yet Hafiz
Could set you upon a Stage 

And worship you forever!

--Hafiz of Shiraz (1310-1390), one of the greatest Persian lyric poets