Resurrection

My friend a writer and scientist

has retreated to a monastery
where he has submitted himself
out of exhaustion to not knowing.
He’s been thinking about
the incarnation a.k.a. Big Bang
after hearing a monk’s teaching
that crucifixion was not the hard part
for Christ. Incarnation was.
How to squeeze all of that
all-of-that into a body. I woke
that Easter to think of the Yaqui
celebrations taking place in our city
the culminating ritual of the Gloria
when the disruptive spirits
with their clacking daggers and swords
are repelled from the sanctuary
by women and children
throwing cottonwood leaves and confetti
and then my mother rose
in me rose from the anguish
of her hospice bed a woman
who expected to direct all the action
complaining to her nurse
I’ve been here three days
and I’m not dead yet—not ready
at one hundred and two to give up
control even to giving up control.
I helped with the morphine clicker.
Peace peace peace the stilling
at her throat the hazel eye
become a glassy marble. Yet here she is
an Easter irreverent still rising
to dress in loud pastels
and turn me loose
in Connecticut woods to hunt
my basket of marshmallow eggs
jelly beans and chocolate rabbit
there fakeries of nature made vestal
incarnated in their nest of shiny manufactured grass.

--Alison Hawthorne Deming (1945- ), American poet and essayist

A Sonnet Prayer (in memory of Shakespeare)

In gratitude we bow before your grace,
O God, our bulwark and our steadfast shield.
We humbly offer You our thanks and praise,
That love be sown within our hearts, and yield
A hundred-fold, all for your gospel's sake--
That life and hope may rise on eagle's wing,
That we bless all by Christ's clear call, and make
Our lives, for all in need, an offering.
Burnish our souls, O Truth of God, like brass
That we reflect your love that makes us one.
"Let never day nor night unhallowed pass,
But still remember what the Lord hath done;"
Lord Christ, may we walk humbly in your way
And grant your peace upon these souls, we pray.

Amen.

-- LKS, written on the 505th anniversary of Shakespeare's death on this date in 1516.

Memento

We will all leave

                  unfinished business.

pages scattered across a desk

grit on the windowsill

                  where the leaves blow in

laundry at the bottom of the stairs

the fetor of old bacon seeping through the house.

With interminable patience a single white cup

                 endures the dripping faucet.

Your query hangs in the air.

But for a debt paid

a word spoken

a life given

fitly received.

--The Rev. Michael Knowles, poet, preacher, teacher, and cleric in the Anglican Church of Canada, from The Anglican Theological Review, Winter 2020, Volume 102, Number 1

The Idea of Order at Key West

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean. 

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard. 

For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea. 

                            It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour it solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
in ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.


-- Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), American lawyer, businessman, and poet

The Starlight Night

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes!
The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!
Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!
Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!
Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.

Buy then! bid then! — What? — Prayer, patience, alms, vows.
Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!
Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!
These are indeed the barn; withindoors house
The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse
Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

--Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), English Victorian poet and Jesuit priest

A Wild Embrace

How creation dares us into
a wild embrace of what is
too beautiful to ignore. You open
your front door.
Breathe, and all the old dust and confusion
of your life falls behind you.
You are not to obsess about it, 

no matter how it calls you.
Instead, bend and examine
closely how the grass has grown
an inch under last night’s rain,
and the peony buds are swelling,
the tips of pink petals already
bursting free like prisoners
wrongly convicted and now
released. There is such generosity
out there, reaching towards you
with hands open, claiming you,
a created being issuing
from the open mouth of God.

--Luci Shaw (1928- ), poet, editor, and Episcopalian, from The Generosity: Poems (2020).

Late Easter, Spring Come Lately

She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.

In one of John Donne’s under-read
hymns, on his sickness, he claims one place
held Paradise and Calvary—Adam’s disgrace,
too: over whose tree we choose instead

the cross of the tender forester.
He tended there by virtue of his blood
the ancient ruin of that prior wood.
(Its seed was left in Adam’s mouth at first,

by Seth, as legend has it, or so it goes.)
And so the fevered poet felt the sweat
of elder Adam, even as his soul met
in extremity new Adam in clothes

fit for cultivation. Lilied fields exhibit
still some aboriginal greenhouse of Love.
It’s enough to make one’s mind flutter over
another poet full of holy ambition,

who borrowed lilies from a deceased
imperial nephew, scraped the epic
sadness from their petals. He quickly
tuned them to a better season,

while with great reasonableness
his blessed one arrived by chariot,
clad in green and red, his fair excoriator.
Her lesson? Hope should be unceasing,
yet stern as a plunger that excavates
those parasitic sins from any scrounging,
gaunt-faced pilgrim. Then the longed-
for orbit commenced, longing sated.

His soul became both wholly full,
yet pulled by fiercer hunger from folly
toward heaven’s center, ultimate pole,
temple where God welcomes fools.

--Brett Foster (1973-2015), American poet, Renaissance scholar, and teacher,  from Image Journal

Image: Noli Me Tangere, Grant Sutherland, Chichester Cathedral

The Widow's Lament in Springtime

Sorrow is my one yard
where the new grass
flames as it has flamed
often before but not
with the cold fire
that closes round me this year.
Thirtyfive years
I lived with my husband. 
The plumtree is white today
with masses of flowers.
Masses of flowers
load the cherry branches 
and color some bushes 
yellow and some red 
but the grief in my heart 
is stronger than they 
for though they were my joy 
formerly, today I notice them 
and turn away forgetting. 
Today my son told me 
that in the meadows, 
at the edge of the heavy woods 
in the distance, he saw 
trees of white flowers. 
I feel that I would like 
to go there 
and fall into those flowers 
and sink into the marsh near them.

--William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), American poet and author

Noli Me Tangere: San Marco, Florence

Outside this cell the sparrows repeat
their seasonal songs.
Here a fresco to teach the soul
the same lesson over and over.

I come often. I think
of the monk who, each morning, faced
the grief of reaching out for what is always
just out of reach.

Just the other side
of Mary's outstretched hands,
Christ's trailing hand serenely denies.
His lightened body leaves no footprints

in the grass. For too many years
I have seen your hands laid at your sides,
your face which left me nothing
I could say.

In this cell, I see the monk’s breath
following him as he walks.
I see how Mary keeps
entering the solitudes of grief,

her hands filling with memory
as one by one by one
those last perfect words drift beyond
her understanding.


--Robert Cording, (1949- ), American poet and teacher, from A Word in My Mouth: Selected Spiritual Poems

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that-pierced-died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

-- John Updike (1932-2009), American novelist and poet

Limbo

The ancient greyness shifted

Suddenly and thinned
Like mist upon the moors
Before a wind.
An old, old prophet lifted
A shining face and said:
“He will be coming soon.
The Son of God is dead;
He died this afternoon.”

A murmurous excitement stirred
All souls.
They wondered if they dreamed –
Save one old man who seemed
Not even to have heard.

And Moses, standing,
Hushed them all to ask
If any had a welcome song prepared.
If not, would David take the task?
And if they cared
Could not the three young children sing
The Benedicite, the canticle of praise
They made when God kept them from perishing
In the fiery blaze?

A breath of spring surprised them,
Stilling Moses’ words.
No one could speak, remembering
The first fresh flowers,
The little singing birds.
Still others thought of fields new ploughed
Or apple trees
All blossom-boughed.
Or some, the way a dried bed fills
With water Laughing down green hills.
The fisherfolk dreamed of the foam
On bright blue seas.
The one old man who had not stirred
Remembered home.

And there He was
Splendid as the morning sun and fair
As only God is fair.
And they, confused with joy,
Knelt to adore
Seeing that He wore
Five crimson stars
He never had before.

No canticle at all was sung
None toned a psalm, or raised a greeting song,
A silent man alone
Of all that throng
Found tongue –
Not any other.
Close to His heart
When the embrace was done,
Old Joseph said,
“How is Your Mother,
How is Your Mother, Son?”

-- Sister Mary Ada, from The Mary Book, ed. F. J. Sheed

Excerpt from "Little Gidding" for Holy Saturday

What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.


--T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), from "Little Gidding"

Station XIV: Jesus is laid in the tomb

Here at the centre everything is still
Before the stir and movement of our grief
Which bears it’s pain with rhythm, ritual,
Beautiful useless gestures of relief.
So they anoint the skin that cannot feel
Soothing his ruined flesh with tender care,
Kissing the wounds they know they cannot heal,
With incense scenting only empty air.
He blesses every love that weeps and grieves
And makes our grief the pangs of a new birth.
The love that’s poured in silence at old graves
Renewing flowers, tending the bare earth,
Is never lost. In him all love is found
And sown with him, a seed in the rich ground.

-- Malcolm Guite (1954- ), Anglican priest, songwriter, theologian, and musician, from his blog.

Image: "Jesus is laid in the tomb," Gwyneth Leech

Sepulchre

Oh blessed body! Whither art thou thrown?
No lodging for thee, but a cold hard stone?
So many hearts on earth, and yet not one
Receive thee?

Sure there is room within our hearts good store;
For they can lodge transgressions by the score:
Thousands of toys dwell there, yet out of door
They leave thee.

But that which shows them large, shows them unfit.
Whatever sin did this pure rock commit,
Which holds thee now? Who hath indicted it
Of murder?

Where our hard hearts have took up stones to brain thee,
And missing this, most falsely did arraign thee;
Only these stones in quiet entertain thee,
And order.

And as of old, the law by heav’nly art,
Was writ in stone; so thou, which also art
The letter of the word, find’st no fit heart
To hold thee.

Yet do we still persist as we began,
And so should perish, but that nothing can,
Though it be cold, hard, foul, from loving man
Withhold thee.

-- George Herbert (1593-1633), Welsh- born Anglican priest and poet

A Blackbird Singing

It seems wrong that out of this bird,
Black, bold, a suggestion of dark
Places about it, there yet should come
Such rich music, as though the notes’
Ore were changed to a rare metal
At one touch of that bright bill.

You have heard it often, alone at your desk
In a green April, your mind drawn
Away from its work by sweet disturbance
Of the mild evening outside your room.

A slow singer, but loading each phrase
With histories overtones, love, joy
And grief learned by his dark tribe
In other orchards and passed on
Instinctively as they are now,
But fresh always with new tears.

--R. S. Thomas (1913-2000), Welsh poet and Anglican priest from Collected Poems, 1945-1990.

Good Friday

I deserve this death, Betrayed, broken, and despised, You did nothing wrong. If truly you still want me, Blessed be this day in my sight.

INRI

The two fools died first. Would Barabbas hung by me— Paradise enough. Let me once down from this cross I’d fling the nails in your eyes.

--Charles Munger, Jr. from Journey with Jesus 

The Seven Last Words

1
The story of the end, of the last word
of the end, when told, is a story that never ends.
We tell it and retell it — one word, then another
until it seems that no last word is possible,
that none would be bearable. Thus, when the hero
of the story says to himself, as to someone far away,
‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do,’
we may feel that he is pleading for us, that we are
the secret life of the story and, as long as his plea
is not answered, we shall be spared. So the story
continues. So we continue. And the end, once more,
becomes the next, and the next after that.

2
There is an island in the dark, a dreamt-of place
where the muttering wind shifts over the white lawns
and riffles the leaves of trees, the high trees
that are streaked with gold and line the walkways there;
and those already arrived are happy to be the silken
remains of something they were but cannot recall;
they move to the sound of stars, which is also imagined,
but who cares about that; the polished columns they see
may be no more than shafts of sunlight, but for those
who live on and on in the radiance of their remains
this is of little importance. There is an island
in the dark and you will be there, I promise you, you
shall be with me in paradise, in the single season of being,
in the place of forever, you shall find yourself. And there
the leaves will turn and never fall, there the wind
will sing and be your voice as if for the first time.

3
Someday some one will write a story set
in a place called The Skull, and it will tell,
among other things, of a parting between mother
and son, of how she wandered off, of how he vanished
in air. But before that happens, it will describe
how their faces shone with a feeble light and how
the son was moved to say, ‘Woman, look at your son,’
then to a friend nearby, ‘Son, look at your mother.’
At which point the writer will put down his pen
and imagine that while those words were spoken
something else happened, something unusual like
a purpose revealed, a secret exchanged, a truth
to which they, the mother and son, would be bound,
but what it was no one would know. Not even the writer.

4
These are the days when the sky is filled with
the odor of lilac, when darkness becomes desire,
when there is nothing that does not wish to be born.
These are the days of spring when the fate
of the present is a breezy fullness, when the world’s
great gift for fiction gilds even the dirt we walk on.
On such days we feel we could live forever, yet all
the while we know we cannot. This is the doubleness
in which we dwell. The great master of weather
and everything else, if he wishes, can bring forth
a dark of a different kind, one hidden by darkness
so deep it cannot be seen. No one escapes.
Not even the man who saved others, and believed
he was the chosen son. When the dark came down
even he cried out, ‘Father, father, why have you
forsaken me?’ But to his words no answer came.

5
To be thirsty. To say, ‘I thirst.’ To be given,
instead of water, vinegar, and that to be pressed
from a sponge. To close one’s eyes and see the giant
world that is born each time the eyes are closed.
To see one’s death. To see the darkening clouds
as the tragic cloth of a day of mourning. To be the one
mourned. To open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover
what one suspected, that the only word in it
is nothing. To try to open one’s eyes, but not to be
able to. To feel the mouth burn. To feel the sudden
presence of what, again and again, was not said.
To translate it and have it remain unsaid. To know
at last that nothing is more real than nothing.

6
‘It is finished,’ he said. You could hear him say it,
the words almost a whisper, then not even that,
but an echo so faint it seemed no longer to come
from him, but from elsewhere. This was his moment,
his final moment. “It is finished,” he said into a vastness
that led to an even greater vastness, and yet all of it
within him. He contained it all. That was the miracle,
to be both large and small in the same instant, to be
like us, but more so, then finally to give up the ghost,
which is what happened. And from the storm that swirled
a formal nakedness took shape, the truth of disguise
and the mask of belief were joined forever.

7
Back down these stairs to the same scene,
to the moon, the stars, the night wind. Hours pass
and only the harp off in the distance and the wind
moving through it. And soon the sun’s gray disk,
darkened by clouds, sailing above. And beyond,
as always, the sea of endless transparence, of utmost
calm, a place of constant beginning that has within it
what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, what no hand
has touched, what has not arisen in the human heart.
To that place, to the keeper of that place, I commit myself.

--Mark Strand (1934-2014) American poet and translator, US Poet Laureate 1990

Savior

Petulant priests, greedy
centurions, and one million
incensed gestures stand
between your love and me.

Your agape sacrifice
is reduced to colored glass,
vapid penance, and the
tedium of ritual.

Your footprints yet
mark the crest of
billowing seas but
your joy
fades upon the tablets
of ordained prophets.

Visit us again, Savior.
Your children, burdened with
disbelief, blinded by a patina
of wisdom,
carom down this vale of
fear. We cry for you
although we have lost
your name.

-- Maya Angelou (1928-2014), African American autobiographer, poet, humanitarian, and activist

From Blossoms

From blossoms comes
This brown paper bag of peaches
We bought from the boy
At the bend in the road where we turned toward 

Signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
From sweet fellowship in the bins, 

Comes nectar at the roadside, succulent 

Peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
Comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
To carry within us an orchard, to eat
Not only the skin, but the shade,
Not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
The fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into 

The round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
As if death were nowhere
In the background; from joy
To joy to joy, from wing to wing,
From blossom to blossom to
Impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

-- Li-Young Lee, from Good Poems, edited by Garrison Keillor

St. Peter

St. Peter once: “Lord, doest Thou wash my feet?”

—Much more I say: Lord, dost Thou stand and knock
At my closed heart more rugged than a rock,
Bolted and barred, for Thy soft touch unmet,
Nor garnished in any wise made sweet?
Owls roost within and dancing satyrs mock.
Lord, I have heard the crowing of the cock
And have not wept: ah, Lord, thou knowest it.
Yet still I hear Thee knocking, still I hear:
“Open to Me, look on Me eye to eye,
That I may wring thy heart and make it whole;
And teach thee love because I hold thee dear
And sup with thee in gladness soul with soul,
And sup with thee in glory by and by.”

-- Christina Rosetti, English poet and supporter of the Oxford movement

Maundy Thursday

Kneeling on Boston Common it’s the foot
Naked, resting in my lap with clean towel,
Socks, warm water waiting, that tells me
This is what happens after a cold winter
Of deep snow when you’re homeless in
Dirty socks and cracked shoes that don’t fit:
This foot, bloody, swollen, toes deformed,
I wash gently, first one, then the other, and
Never have I felt so close to Jesus, his feet,
Bare, pierced, bloodied, nailed to the wooden
Cross.

-- Sarah Rossiter, from the Christian Century, April 8, 2011