Iceland

Last night I dreamed of icy cliffs
Standing on the precipice
I leaned to see just where the edge would take me
The wind came up, I closed my eyes
I heard a shout and to my surprise
A hand reached out and pulled me back to safety

What's a hand, what's a dream
Who can say what it means
When everything that you know
Can disappear
Don't look back, the spirits cry
Just be glad to be alive
Everything that you love is right here
Everything that you love:

Life feels smaller than this stone
Worn smooth inside my palm
I keep it like a charm inside my pocket
I keep thinking I'll flame out
Leave no one with a doubt
That I was meant to fire like a rocket

What's a stone, what's a flame
There's always someone else to blame
When everything that you know disappears
Don't look back the spirits cry
Just be glad to be alive
Everything that you need is right here
Everything that you need:

When I'm left here on the shore
The ancient basalt moor
Will beckon me to sleep among its heather
Who's not tempted to fold in
So that sleep may come again
Where the fire and the ice hide their treasure

Everything that you love
Everything that you need

--Mary Chapin Carpenter (1958- ), American singer-songwriter and poet, from her album The Age of Miracles (2010) She explains this song here.

The Stone of Witness

 

Joshua said to all the people, 
“See, this stone shall be a witness against us; 
for it has heard all the words of the Lord that he spoke to us… "- Joshua 24:27a

 

This pale stone from St. Columba’s Bay
had lain beneath pilgrim feet for a thousand years before
singing its way to my notice; its delicate web of
fine green tracings draws the eye into the stone, its heft
surprising for a marble-cool thumbprint. Glossy
and silky to the touch, it bears witness

to the caress of tides and the melancholy
wandering of saints. What prayers has it heard
from all who have passed this way—what prayers
can I whisper to it as it slides between my fingers?

Two billion years it tumbled
to the ebb and flow of windswept tide.
From its holy home it now resides
in my pocket most days, a traveler and thus a stranger,
honed by the caress of the sea.

 

And now I recognize the toddler wisdom
in filling one’s pockets
with treasures from the ground: they witness
to the loving embrace of this Earth
carrying us tenderly around the Sun, grounding us
in wonder and awe, bearing testimony
to the holiness arching up beneath our feet.

-- Leslie Barnes Scoopmire, first published at Episcopal Journal's Speaking to the Soul on July 28, 2022.

The Secret

 

Two girls discover 
the secret of life 
in a sudden line of 
poetry.

I who don’t know the 
secret wrote 
the line. They 
told me

(through a third person) 
they had found it
but not what it was 
not even

what line it was. No doubt 
by now, more than a week 
later, they have forgotten 
the secret,

the line, the name of 
the poem. I love them 
for finding what 
I can’t find,

and for loving me 
for the line I wrote, 
and for forgetting it 
so that

a thousand times, till death 
finds them, they may 
discover it again, in other 
lines

in other 
happenings. And for 
wanting to know it, 
for

assuming there is 
such a secret, yes, 
for that 
most of all.

--Denise Levertov (1923-1997), Anglo-American poet, daughter of a Russian-Jewish father who became an Anglican priest and a Welsh mother descended from Welsh mystics, convert to Roman Catholicism.

Primary Wonder

Days pass when I forget the mystery.

Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; cap and bells.
                                                          And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng's clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, O Lord,
Creator, Hallowed One, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.

--Denise Levertov (1923–1997),  Anglo-American poet, daughter of a Welsh mother and a Hasidic father who became an Anglican priest, convert to Christianity at 60.

The Soul's Expression

With stammering lips and insufficient sound.
I strive and struggle to deliver right

That music of my nature, day and night
With dream and thought and feeling, interwound,
And inly answering all the senses round
With octaves of a mystic depth and height,
Which step out grandly to the infinite
From the dark edges of the sensual ground!
The song of soul I struggle to outwear
Through portals of the sense, sublime and whole,
And utter all myself into the air:
But if I did it,-- as the thunder-roll
Braeks its own cloud,-- my flesh would perish there,
Before that dread apocalypse of soul.

--Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), Romantic-era British poet, author, and activist, spouse of Robert Browning

Thy Kingdom Come

Thy kingdom come with power and grace
In every heart of man;
Thy peace and joy and righteousness
In all our bosoms reign!

The righteousness that never ends,
But makes an end of sin;
The joy that human thought transcends,
Now to our souls bring in;

The kingdom of established peace,
Which can no more remove;
The perfect power of Godliness;
The omnipotence of Love!

--Charles Wesley (1707-1788), English priest, hymns, and poets, founder with his brother of the movement eventually known as Methodism. He wrote over 6500 hymns in his lifetime.

Scriptural Reference: Luke 11:1-13, Proper 12C

Evening Prayer

I believe my sin
to be entirely common:
the request for help
Masking request for favor
and the plea for pity
thinly veiling complaint.

So little at peace in the spring evening,
I pray for strength, for direction,
but I also ask
to survive my illness
(the immediate one)—never mind
anything in the future.
I make this a special point,
this unconcern for the future,
also the courage I will have acquired by then
to meet my suffering alone
but with heightened fortitude.

Tonight, in my unhappiness,
I wonder what qualities this presumes
in the one who listens.
And as the breeze stirs
the leaves of the little birch tree,
I construct a presence
wholly skeptical and wholly tender,
thus incapable of surprise.

I believe my sin is common, therefore
intended; I can feel
the leaves stir, sometimes
with words, sometimes without,
as though the highest form of pity
could be irony.

Bedtime, they whisper.
Time to begin lying.


--Louise Gluck (1943- ), American poet, and teacher, US Poet Laureate 2003, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2020

Autumn Psalm

A full year passed (the seasons keep me honest)
since I last noticed this same commotion.
Who knew God was an abstract expressionist?

I’m asking myself—the very question
I asked last year, staring out at this array
of racing colors, then set in motion

by the chance invasion of a Steller’s jay.
Is this what people mean by speed of light?
My usually levelheaded mulberry tree

hurling arrows everywhere in sight—
its bow: the out-of-control Virginia creeper
my friends say I should do something about,

whose vermilion went at least a full shade deeper
at the provocation of the upstart blue,
the leaves (half green, half gold) suddenly hyper

in savage competition with that red and blue—
tohubohu returned, in living color.
Kandinsky: where were you when I needed you?

My attempted poem would lie fallow a year;
I was so busy focusing on the desert’s
stinginess with everything but rumor.

No place even for the spectrum’s introverts—
rose, olive, gray—no pigment at all—
and certainly no room for shameless braggarts

like the ones that barge in here every fall
and make me feel like an unredeemed failure
even more emphatically than usual.

And here they are again, their fleet allure
still more urgent this time—the desert’s gone;
I’m through with it, want something fuller—

why shouldn’t a person have a little fun,
some utterly unnecessary extravagance?
Which was—at least I think it was—God’s plan

when He set up (such things are never left to chance)
that one split-second assignation
with genuine, no-kidding-around omnipotence

what, for lack of better words, I’m calling vision.
You breathe in, and, for once, there’s something there.
Just when you thought you’d learned some resignation,

there’s real resistance in the nearby air
until the entire universe is swayed.
Even that desert of yours isn’t quite so bare

and God’s not nonexistent; He’s just been waylaid
by a host of what no one could’ve foreseen.
He’s got plans for you: this red-gold-green parade

is actually a fairly detailed outline.
David never needed one, but he’s long dead
and God could use a little recognition.

He promises. It won’t go to His head
and if you praise Him properly (an autumn psalm!
Why didn’t I think of that?) you’ll have it made.

But while it’s true that my Virginia creeper praises Him,
its palms and fingers crimson with applause,
that the local breeze is weaving Him a diadem,

inspecting my tree’s uncut gold for flaws,
I came to talk about the way that violet-blue
sprang the greens and reds and yellows

into action: actual motion. I swear it’s true
though I’m not sure I ever took it in.
Now I’d be prepared, if some magician flew

into my field of vision, to realign
that dazzle out my window yet again.
It’s not likely, but I’m keeping my eyes open

though I still wouldn’t be able to explain
precisely what happened to these vines, these trees.
It isn’t available in my tradition.

For this, I would have to be Chinese,
Wang Wei, to be precise, on a mountain,
autumn rain converging on the trees,

a cassia flower nearby, a cloud, a pine,
washerwomen heading home for the day,
my senses and the mountain so entirely in tune

that when my stroke of blue arrives, I’m ready.
Though there is no rain here: the air’s shot through
with gold on golden leaves. Wang Wei’s so giddy

he’s calling back the dead: Li Bai! Du Fu!
Guys! You’ve got to see this—autumn sun!
They’re suddenly hell-bent on learning Hebrew

in order to get inside the celebration,
which explains how they wound up where they are
in my university library’s squashed domain.

Poor guys, it was Hebrew they were looking for,
but they ended up across the aisle from Yiddish—
some Library of Congress cataloger’s sense of humor:

the world’s calmest characters and its most skittish
squinting at each other, head to head,
all silently intoning some version of kaddish

for their nonexistent readers, one side’s dead
(the twentieth century’s lasting contribution)
and the other’s insufficiently learned

to understand a fraction of what they mean.
The writings in the world’s most spoken language
across from one that can barely get a minyan.

Sick of lanzmen, the yidden are trying to engage
the guys across the aisle in some conversation:
How, for example, do you squeeze an image

into so few words, respectfully asks Glatstein.
Wang Wei, at first, doesn’t understand the problem
but then he shrugs his shoulders, mumbles Zen

... but, please, I, myself, overheard a poem,
in the autumn rain, once, on a mountain.
How do you do it? I believe it’s called a psalm?

Glatstein’s cronies all crack up in unison.
Okay, groise macher, give him an answer.
But Glatstein dons his yarmulke (who knew he had one?)

and starts the introduction to the morning prayer,
Pisukei di zimrah, psalm by psalm.
Wang Wei is spellbound, the stacks’ stale air

suddenly a veritable balm
and I’m so touched by these amazing goings-on
that I’ve forgotten all about the autumn

staring straight at me: still alive, still golden.
What’s gold, anyway, compared to poetry?
a trick of chlorophyll, a trick of sun.

True. It was something, my changing tree
with its perfect complement: a crimson vine,
both thrown into panic by a Steller’s jay,

but it’s hard to shake the habit of digression.
Wandering has always been my people’s way
whether we’re in a desert or narration.

It’s too late to emulate Wang Wei
and his solitary years on that one mountain
though I’d love to say what I set out to say

just once. Next autumn, maybe. What’s the occasion?
Glatstein will shout over to me from the bookcase
(that is, if he’s paying any attention)

and, finally, I’ll look him in the face.
Quick. Out the window, Yankev. It’s here again.

--Jaqueline Osherow (1958- ), American Jewish poet, from The Hoopoe's Crown: Poems (2005)

Echoes

1.

Once I could imagine my soul
I could imagine my death.
When I imagined my death
my soul died. This
I remember clearly.

My body persisted.
Not thrived, but persisted.
Why I do not know.

2.

When I was still very young
my parents moved to a small valley surrounded by mountains
in what was called the lake country.
From our kitchen garden
you could see the mountains,
snow covered, even in summer.

I remember peace of a kind
I never knew again.

Somewhat later, I took it upon myself
to become an artist,
to give voice to these impressions.

3.

The rest I have told you already.
A few years of fluency, and then
the long silence, like the silence in the valley
before the mountains send back
your own voice changed to the voice of nature.

This silence is my companion now.
I ask: of what did my soul die?
and the silence answers

if your soul died, whose life
are you living and
when did you become that person?




--Louise Gluck (1943- ), American poet, and teacher, US Poet Laureate 2003, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2020

Irish Blessing- Poor in Misfortune

May you be poor in misfortune,

Rich in blessings,
Slow to make enemies,
And quick to make friends.
But rich or poor, quick or slow,
May you know nothing but happiness
From this day forward.

-- Traditional Irish blessing

On the Jericho Road

 

On the Jericho road his luck ran out.

The air above the beaten track shimmered
and hissed like a snake. One sandal
lay in the center of the road, vanquished—the thieves
had left that, but all else was gone. 
Its forsaken foot curled up into the lip of the ditch,
disembodied. The man laid there,
arms flung wide, like a fledgling who had
fallen to earth; astonishment curtained 
his inert mouth. He floated
in a sea of dust, blood
pooling in tracks from his wounds. A buzzard
clasped a crag, sensing promise.

 

Perhaps the road would bring a savior.

Face toward Jerusalem, the priest 
placed each foot delicately after the other, and then
drew the drape of his robe
across his face at the sight, blanched,
and muttered charms to ward off evil
as he moved to the other side, eyes averted. 
A prayer of thanks rose skyward,
congratulating himself for his own righteousness,
to preserve him from such a fate. So too
the Son of Levi--he clasped his ewer by the handle,
suspicion of ambush and 
contempt seizing his heart like a fist,
edging away on his holy business.

A buzz of flies eddied in his wake.
The buzzard snorted humorlessly 
and shrugged.

Not long now.

There was no one to see, they thought—
but behind the blue veil of sky
the stars blinked 
and spun in protest.

The sun mounted higher.
A Samaritan approached, 
fresh from shunning by the priest and Levite,
who’d made him walk around them.
But at the sandal he slowed, his donkey
shaking her head, skittish at tang and echo of violence
in her nostrils and ears, at the glare
that glowed off sunburned flesh. 
Her master crouched beside
the discarded sack of a man, 
leaking like a burst wineskin. 
He could still walk away.

 

                                    “Cursed be
the one who leads the blind
on the road astray, or distorts
the justice and mercy owed a stranger,”
the Samaritan murmured.
The donkey breathed the amens.

A trumpet blare of mercy
echoed in his soul’s chamber; the 
walls of the Samaritan's heart lay in rubble.

With gentle hands he shifted the donkey’s load until
he found wine and oil,
anointing the wounds 
and cooling the stranger’s brow.

Like a mother, tenderly he drew 
the fevered body to his chest, arms beneath 
neck and knee, and raised his neighbor
from ditch to donkey delicately,
claiming the stranger as his brother, 
whose heartbeat was an obligation, whose face
so closely resembled his own,
and only the buzzard turned a baleful eye,
a grudging witness.

--Leslie Barnes Scoopmire

Scripture Reference: Luke 10:25-37 (Proper 10C)

The Good Samaritan

How kind the good Samaritan
To him who fell among the thieves!
Thus Jesus pities fallen man,
And heals the wounds the soul receives.

O! I remember well the day,
When sorely wounded, nearly slain;
Like that poor man I bleeding lay,
And groaned for help, but groaned in vain.

Men saw me in this helpless case,
And passed without compassion by;
Each neighbor turned away his face,
Unmoved by my mournful cry.

But he whose name had been my scorn,
As Jews Samaritans despise
Came, when he saw me thus forlorn,
With love and pity in his eyes.

Gently he raised me from the ground,
Pressed me to lean upon his arm;
And into every gaping wound
He poured his own all-healing balm.

Unto his church my steps he led,
The house prepared for sinners lost;
Gave charge I should be clothed and fed;
And took upon him all the cost.

Thus saved from death, from want secured,
I wait till he again shall come,
When I shall be completely cured
And take me to his heav’nly home.

There through eternal boundless days,
When nature’s wheel no longer rolls,
How shall I love, adore, and praise,
This good Samaritan to souls!




--John Newton (1725-1807), former slave ship captain and investor in the slave trade who became an abolitionist and Anglican priest; he is best known as the author of the lyrics to the Hymn "Amazing Grace." The British abolished the slave trade just weeks before he died.

Scripture reference: Luke 10:25-37 (Proper 10C)