September, the First Day of School

I

My child and I hold hands on the way to school,
And when I leave him at the first-grade door
He cries a little but is brave; he does
Let go. My selfish tears remind me how
I cried before that door a life ago.
I may have had a hard time letting go.
Each fall the children must endure together
What every child also endures alone:
Learning the alphabet, the integers,
Three dozen bits and pieces of a stuff
So arbitrary, so peremptory,
That worlds invisible and visible
Bow down before it, as in Joseph's dream
The sheaves bowed down and then the stars bowed down
Before the dreaming of a little boy.
That dream got him such hatred of his brothers
As cost the greater part of life to mend,
And yet great kindness came of it in the end.

II

A school is where they grind the grain of thought,
And grind the children who must mind the thought.
It may be those two grindings are but one,
As from the alphabet come Shakespeare's Plays,
As from the integers comes Euler's Law,
As from the whole, inseperably, the lives,
The shrunken lives that have not been set free
By law or by poetic phantasy.
But may they be. My child has disappeared
Behind the schoolroom door. And should I live
To see his coming forth, a life away,
I know my hope, but do not know its form
Nor hope to know it. May the fathers he finds
Among his teachers have a care of him
More than his father could. How that will look
I do not know, I do not need to know.
Even our tears belong to ritual.
But may great kindness come of it in the end.

-- Howard Nemerov (1920-1991) American poet, two time poet laureate of the United States (1963-1964 and 1988-1990) and professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

Ethel's Sestina

Ethel Freeman's body sat for days in her wheelchair outside the New Orleans Convention Center. Her son Herbert, who had assured his mother that help was on the way, was forced to leave her there once she died.

Gon’ be obedient in this here chair, 

gon’ bide my time, fanning against this sun. 

I ask my boy, and all he says is Wait. 

He wipes my brow with steam, says I should sleep. 

I trust his every word. Herbert my son. 

I believe him when he says help gon’ come. 

Been so long since all these suffrin’ folks come 

to this place. Now on the ground ’round my chair, 

they sweat in my shade, keep asking my son 

could that be a bus they see. It’s the sun 

foolin’ them, shining much too loud for sleep, 

making us hear engines, wheels. Not yet. Wait. 

Lawd, some folks prayin’ for rain while they wait, 

forgetting what rain can do. When it come, 

it smashes living flat, wakes you from sleep, 

eats streets, washes you clean out of the chair 

you be sittin’ in. Best to praise this sun, 

shinin’ its dry shine. Lawd have mercy, son, 

is it coming? Such a strong man, my son. 

Can’t help but believe when he tells us, Wait. 

Wait some more. Wish some trees would block this sun. 

We wait. Ain’t no white men or buses come, 

but look—see that there? Get me out this chair, 

help me stand on up. No time for sleepin’, 

cause look what’s rumbling this way. If you sleep 

you gon’ miss it. Look there, I tell my son. 

He don’t hear. I’m ’bout to get out this chair, 

but the ghost in my legs tells me to wait, 

wait for the salvation that’s sho to come. 

I see my savior’s face ’longside that sun. 

Nobody sees me running toward the sun. 

Lawd, they think I done gone and fell asleep. 

They don't hear Come. 

Come. 

Come. 

Come. 

Come. 

Come. 

Come. 

Ain’t but one power make me leave my son. 

I can’t wait, Herbert. Lawd knows I can’t wait. 

Don’t cry, boy, I ain’t in that chair no more. 

Wish you coulda come on this journey, son, 

seen that ol’ sweet sun lift me out of sleep. 

Didn’t have to wait. And see my golden chair?

--Patricia Smith (1955- ), award-winning African American poet, professor, poetry slam champion

Hurricane Katrina made landfall (for the second time after crossing Florida) near New Orleans on this day and at this hour in 2005.

Guests, Not Hosts

In the beginning, 

our very first story about ourselves ends 
with the reminder we were born hungry,
body and soul:

On the day before God rested, at the dawn 
of time, God granted the newborn humanity
every herb and fruit tree for our food,
sprung from the same soil
as we were. God invites us all
to a seat at the wedding table of creation-
creation we are bound to
creation we are bound to care for,
into which we ourselves are woven
as a part of the whole. There is
one table, and it is the altar
and sacred precincts
of life itself, insisting on our unity
in shared need for nourishment.

And so it is that we are reminded
in our body’s hunger, and by our food,
from the juiciest boredom-plucked berry
and truffles worth their weight in gold,
to bologna with spelled-out first and second names,
that all the sustenance we receive
is provided from this fragile planet
by God’s tender loving-kindness.

And so it is the soul’s hunger
draws us around God’s holy table
for a foretaste of heaven,
bearing our offerings from God’s creation
formed by human hands, yes,
but sacrament at the invocation
of the finger of God in our midst.
It’s a wonder
our hair doesn’t stand on end.

We are fed 
not through our words
but by holy gift
that calls us into God’s own unity.

You can have communion,
or you can have competition,
but not both. 
We share with each other
what is not ours to give 
or take away.

There can be no jostling or jockeying
for the best place at this table, just rejoicing
that all are invited,
that there is room to spare,
that we are guests, not hosts.

-- Leslie Barnes Scoopmire. This was first published at Episcopal Journal's Speaking to the Soul on August 25, 2022. 

The Gardener Asks for Wonder

 

“Never once in my life did I ask God 
for success or wisdom or power or fame.
I asked for wonder, 

and he gave it to me.” – Abraham Joshua Heschel

 

Knee-deep in a prie-dieu of compost,
I asked for wonder,
and pledged my attention,
hoping to lose
thought of myself
in the prayer of planting (for
both are acts of hope)—

seedlings sliding like prayer beads
through my hands what was once
a ditch-side rogue’s gallery elevated
to rockstar status in repair of the Earth:
Joe Pye weed, bergamot, Indian
blanket, rue, aster, true blue
wild indigo, lead plant, blazing star,
columbine, Queen Anne’s lace, 
even lowly clover and thistle.
Turn, turn, turn; the time to pluck up is gone;
the time to plant our purpose under heaven.

To feel the thrum of life beneath my feet,
human rooted in humus
as in the beginning--
almost like stumbling across
God perambulating in an evening garden
leaving behind dewy footprints fresh from bestriding
the sea, pacing off its measure in refutation of Job;

To hear the ethereal
music of hillside pine needle overhead
propelled by wind, the choir 
of hummingbird and song sparrow bobbing
on risers of redbud to the overture of offstage thunder.

But now it has
come down to this:

God answers through
a single brave
monarch butterfly
fluttering by, the first
of the season (enticed by
suburban crewcut

lawns surrendered
and sacrificed as altars 
to milkweed), and by the once-
quotidian honeybee delicately
and now heroically paying homage,
sending salvations of salvia and soybeans nodding, merely
feeding a planet…

and we rejoice at the sight, remembering
when we fools thought them 
common
as a comma.

Here is our hope on the wing.

--Leslie Barnes Scoopmire, first published at Episcopal Journal's Speaking to the Soul on August 18, 2022.

Forest Sonnet, Whidbey Island

(For a friend in grief,
for the assurance of resurrection )

 

 

Now, no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
No mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for."
     --from “Spring and Fall,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins



Here Sorrow springs and newborn Spring sorrows;
Their grief resolves in fiddleheads tomorrow.
The mournful poet sees the greening leaf
and vaults ahead to autumn's parting grief....

An anticipatory grief, so-called.
Here last year's leaves lie trodden, branch scraped-bald
From winter's remnant grip. But see, as Spring
Flushes first rosy throat, as thrushes sing

God's glory! Still, larks chirruping, skimming
The winds arise from southern vales, brimming
Their blessings upon the restive, waking Earth.
The forest floor will testify that birth

Sings from subsidence, converting death
God's gravid Spirit-- resurrection's breath.

--This was first published at Episcopal Journal's Speaking to the Soul on August 11, 2022.

Faith

I want to write about faith,
about the way the moon rises
over cold snow, night after night,
faithful even as it fades from fullness,
slowly becoming that last curving and impossible
sliver of light before the final darkness.
But I have no faith myself
I refuse it even the smallest entry.
Let this then, my small poem,
like a new moon, slender and barely open,
be the first prayer that opens me to faith.

-- David Whyte (1955- ), Anglo-Irish poet and writer

Scriptural connection: Luke 12:32-40, Proper 14C

Immanence

Morning visitors in St. Lucia

I come in the little things,
Saith the Lord:
Not borne on morning wings
Of majesty, but I have set My Feet
Amidst the delicate and bladed wheat
That springs triumphant in the furrowed sod.
There do I dwell, in weakness and in power;
Not broken or divided, saith our God!
In your strait garden plot I come to flower:
About your porch My Vine
Meek, fruitful, doth entwine;
Waits, at the threshold, Love’s appointed hour.

I come in the little things,
Saith the Lord:
Yea! on the glancing wings
Of eager birds, the softly pattering feet
Of furred and gentle beasts, I come to meet
Your hard and wayward heart. In brown bright eyes
That peep from out the brake, I stand confest.
On every nest
Where feathery Patience is content to brood
And leaves her pleasure for the high emprize
Of motherhood—
There doth My Godhead rest.

I come in the little things,
Saith the Lord:
My starry wings I do forsake,
Love’s highway of humility to take:
Meekly I fit My stature to your need.
In beggar’s part
About your gates I shall not cease to plead—
As man, to speak with man—
Till by such art I shall achieve
My Immemorial Plan,
Pass the low lintel of the human heart.

-- Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) English Anglo-Catholic writer, teacher, mystic and pacifist.

The Transfiguration

So from the ground we felt that virtue branch
Through all our veins till we were whole, our wrists
As fresh and pure as water from a well,
Our hands made new to handle holy things,
The source of all our seeing rinsed and cleansed
Till earth and light and water entering there
Gave back to us the clear unfallen world.
We would have thrown our clothes away for lightness,
But that even they, though sour and travel stained,
Seemed, like our flesh, made of immortal substance,
And the soiled flax and wool lay light upon us
Like friendly wonders, flower and flock entwined
As in a morning field. Was it a vision?
Or did we see that day the unseeable
One glory of the everlasting world
Perpetually at work, though never seen
Since Eden locked the gate that’s everywhere
And nowhere? Was the change in us alone,
And the enormous earth still left forlorn,
An exile or a prisoner? Yet the world
We saw that day made this unreal, for all
Was in its place. The painted animals
Assembled there in gentle congregations,
Or sought apart their leafy oratories,
Or walked in peace, the wild and tame together,
As if, also for them, the day had come.
The shepherds’ hovels shone, for underneath
The soot we saw the stone clean at the heart
As on the starting-day. The refuse heaps
Were grained with that fine dust that made the world;
For he had said, ‘To the pure all things are pure.’
And when we went into the town, he with us,
The lurkers under doorways, murderers,
With rags tied round their feet for silence, came
Out of themselves to us and were with us,
And those who hide within the labyrinth
Of their own loneliness and greatness came,
And those entangled in their own devices,
The silent and the garrulous liars, all
Stepped out of their dungeons and were free.
Reality or vision, this we have seen.
If it had lasted but another moment
It might have held for ever! But the world
Rolled back into its place, and we are here,
And all that radiant kingdom lies forlorn,
As if it had never stirred; no human voice
Is heard among its meadows, but it speaks
To itself alone, alone it flowers and shines
And blossoms for itself while time runs on.
​
But he will come again, it’s said, though not
Unwanted and unsummoned; for all things,
Beasts of the field, and woods, and rocks, and seas,
And all mankind from end to end of the earth
Will call him with one voice. In our own time,
Some say, or at a time when time is ripe.
Then he will come, Christ the uncrucified,
Christ the discrucified, his death undone,
His agony unmade, his cross dismantled—
Glad to be so—and the tormented wood
Will cure its hurt and grow into a tree
In a green springing corner of young Eden,
And Judas damned take his long journey backward
From darkness into light and be a child
Beside his mother’s knee, and the betrayal
Be quite undone and never more be done.

--Edwin Muir (1887-1959), Scots poet, translator, journalist, editor, critic, and writer.

Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration (which is different from Transfiguration Sunday, which is the last Sunday in Epiphany. Yeah, I know.)

The World

I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driv’n by the spheres
Like a vast shadow mov’d; in which the world
And all her train were hurl’d.
The doting lover in his quaintest strain
Did there complain;
Near him, his lute, his fancy, and his flights,
Wit’s sour delights,
With gloves, and knots, the silly snares of pleasure,
Yet his dear treasure
All scatter’d lay, while he his eyes did pour
Upon a flow’r.

The darksome statesman hung with weights and woe,
Like a thick midnight-fog mov’d there so slow,
He did not stay, nor go;
Condemning thoughts (like sad eclipses) scowl
Upon his soul,
And clouds of crying witnesses without
Pursued him with one shout.
Yet digg’d the mole, and lest his ways be found,
Work’d under ground,
Where he did clutch his prey; but one did see
That policy;
Churches and altars fed him; perjuries
Were gnats and flies;
It rain’d about him blood and tears, but he
Drank them as free.

The fearful miser on a heap of rust
Sate pining all his life there, did scarce trust
His own hands with the dust,
Yet would not place one piece above, but lives
In fear of thieves;
Thousands there were as frantic as himself,
And hugg’d each one his pelf;
The downright epicure plac’d heav’n in sense,
And scorn’d pretence,
While others, slipp’d into a wide excess,
Said little less;
The weaker sort slight, trivial wares enslave,
Who think them brave;
And poor despised Truth sate counting by
Their victory.

Yet some, who all this while did weep and sing,
And sing, and weep, soar’d up into the ring;
But most would use no wing.
O fools (said I) thus to prefer dark night
Before true light,
To live in grots and caves, and hate the day
Because it shews the way,
The way, which from this dead and dark abode
Leads up to God,
A way where you might tread the sun, and be
More bright than he.
But as I did their madness so discuss
One whisper’d thus,
“This ring the Bridegroom did for none provide,
But for his bride.”

--Henry Vaughan (1621-1695), Welsh metaphysical poet and physician

Scriptural reference: Luke 12:32-40, Proper 14C

On the Jericho Road

 

Luke 10:25-37

 

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. This was first published at Episcopal Journal's Speaking to the Soul on August 4, 2022.

On the Jericho Road

 

Luke 10:25-37

 

 

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.

--This was first published at Episcopal Journal's Speaking to the Soul on August 4, 2022.

 

Ulysses

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.


--Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), preeminent poet of the Victorian era. My friend Pam's favorite poem, and today she officially retires from teaching after 35 years of inspiring young minds.

Image-- A Roman mosaic of Ulysses (Odysseus).