Psalm

With coals of juniper, Lord, with ripped willow clumps,
with lodge-pole pine and fir, with wind-wrack and slash,
I kindle an all-night fire to mirror You.
No longer waning, no longer falsifying chimes.
No longer smoking out rot, or eclipsing Yeshiva scholars.
No Lord I know what is within magnified.
Stars will just have to wait to eddy through gates of night.
Little swirl, mimicking nebulae, mimicking galaxies, which turns
for no apparent reason other than to cast and recast the whole
as it whirs and whirls, knocks and ticks at three am
in a snit to proclaim itself not as You but it in You.
If I can strut a note, can rack wobbly pins,
balance rocks into signposts, waves into a grass mass or two,
it will hear itself structuring time. This oddly chopped
watched dimension quarters us into early middle late.
Each day scans and wanes, some hope knowing its moaning
is mourning what it erases. The and stamped by the sea
each second. Be with it and what it erases ceases to toll.

-- Emily Warn (1953- ), poet, teacher, and Orthodox Jew, founding editor of poetry foundation.org; and former programmer at Microsoft

The Armful

For every parcel I stoop down to seize
I lose some other off my arms and knees,
And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns —
Extremes too hard to comprehend at once,
Yet nothing I should care to leave behind.
With all I have to hold with hand and mind
And heart, if need be, I will do my best
To keep their building balanced at my breast.
I crouch down to prevent them as they fall;
Then sit down in the middle of them all.
I had to drop the armful in the road
And try to stack them in a better load.

-- Robert Frost

Scripture reference: Mark 10:37-51, Proper 23 B

Saint Francis and the Birds

When Francis preached love to the birds
They listened, fluttered, throttled up
Into the blue like a flock of words

Released for fun from his holy lips.
Then wheeled back, whirred about his head,
Pirouetted on brothers’ capes.

Danced on the wing, for sheer joy played
And sang, like images took flight.
Which was the best poem Francis made,

His argument true, his tone light.

--Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), Irish poet, Northern Irish poet, Nobel Prize winner, Oxford Professor of Poetry, and one of the pre-eminent poets of the 20th century.

St. Francis of Assisi

Would I might wake St. Francis in you all,

Brother of birds and trees, God’s Troubadour,
Blinded with weeping for the sad and poor;
Our wealth undone, all strict Franciscan men,
Come, let us chant the canticle again
Of mother earth and the enduring sun.
God make each soul the lonely leper’s slave;
God make us saints, and brave.

--Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931),  American poet who wrote "singing poetry," meant to be sung or chanted. St. Francis's feast day is tomorrow, October 4.