In Storm-Watch Season

The foaming clematis
Has finished blooming
The autumn
Equinox is here
The air is very still
But day and night
Storms in the Caribbean
Keep the Atlantic roaring

The ocean
Is pouring fog
Into the trees
And with it the fresh smells
Of eel grass and of kelp
Float inland from the torn
And churning beaches

In the storm haunted evening
A cricket
Has begun to sing
A street lamp shines
Deep in the fog
A burr
Of golden light

In three months’ time
We will have snow
In three months’ time
The savior will be born.


--Anne Porter (1911-2011), poet and devout Roman Catholic, from Living Things: Collected Poems

Leavetaking

Nearing the start of that mysterious last season
Which brings us to the close of the other four,
I’m somewhat afraid and don’t know how to prepare
So I will praise you.

I will praise you for the glaze on buttercups
And for the pearly scent of wild fresh water
And the great crossbow shapes of swans flying over
With that strong silken threshing sound of wings
Which you gave them when you made them without voices.

And I will praise you for crickets.
On starry autumn nights
When the earth is cooling
Their rusty diminutive music
Repeated over and over
Is the very marrow of peace.

And I praise you for crows calling from treetops
The speech of my first village,
And for the sparrow’s flash of song
Flinging me in an instant
The joy of a child who woke
Each morning to the freedom
Of her mother’s unclouded love
And lived in it like a country.

And I praise you that from vacant lots
From only broken glass and candy wrappers
You raise up the blue chicory flowers.

I thank you for that secret praise
Which burns in every creature,
And I ask you to bring us to life
Out of every sort of death

And teach us mercy.

--Anne Porter (1911-2011), Roman Catholic poet, from Living Things: Collected Poems

Oaks and Squirrels

Genesis18:27

“I speak to my Lord though I am dust and ashes,”
A Handful of Ashes the wind will soon send flying
Into the drifted oak-leaves under the hedge.
No gardener ever rakes there
Only the squirrels gather bedding there
When they stack up their rustling nests.

You have granted me more time
On earth than the squirrels, less time than the Oak,
Whose secret takes a hundred years to tell.
Out of the acorn in the dirt
Its wooden sticks come up
Already knowing how to grow their leaves
And when to spend them all,
Knowing exactly
How to thread up into a winter sky
A dark-veined map like that of a great river
Spun out in tapering streams,
Twig by twig ascending and unfolding
Until at night its topmost buds
Enter the country of the stars.

By day
The squirrels run like script along its boughs
And write their lives with their light bodies.
They are afraid of us
We can never hold them
And there's no room for us in their invisible ark,
our home is warring disobedient history.


--Anne Porter (1911-2011) American Roman Catholic poet, from Living Things: Collected Poems, 2006.

The First of May

Now the smallest creatures, who do not know they have names, 
In fields of pure sunshine open themselves and sing.
All over the marshes and in the wet meadows,
Wherever there is water, the companies of peepers
Who cannot count their numbers, gather with sweet shouting.
And the flowers of the woods who cannot see each other
Appear in perfect likeness of one another
Among the weak new shadows on the mossy places.

Now the smallest creatures, who know themselves by heart,
With all their tender might and roundness of delight
Spending their colors, their myriads and their voices
Praise the moist ground and every winking leaf,
And the new sun that smells of the new streams.

--Anne Porter (1911-2011), American Catholic poet, from Living Things: Collected Poems

A Year of Jubilee

You grew up like a sapling
With fishermen and shepherds
And the God-haunted mountains
Of your small holy country

You looked the same
As all your people
So for a time
You went unnoticed
You who were later killed
Most cruelly

One Sabbath morning
You stood up in the temple
Young village rabbi
From the provinces

And you unrolled the scroll
And read aloud from it
The Word welled up to us
Out of Isaiah's book
As fresh as the clear streams
That well up in the mountains

"The spirit of the Lord
Has come upon me
He has anointed me
To bring glad tidings
To the poor
To heal the brokenhearted
To give the blind their sight
To free the captives
Release the prisoners and proclaim
A year of jubilee"

We recognized the voice
This was the Promised One
This was the Shepherd
Our hearts were burning.

We listened when you told us
About our heavenly Father
Who wishes us
To cherish one another
To be forgiving, generous
As he is himself

And festive, carefree
As the meadow-flowers
Light as the swallows

He wishes us 
To be like children

You also told us
Our Father
Bless us most of all
When we are poor

So even when our bodies
Have grown old
And our heads are filled with confusion

He will not love us
Any the less for that.

--Anne Porter (1911-2011), American Roman Catholic poet, from Living Things: Collected Poems, 2006

Scripture references: Luke 4:14-21 (3rd After Epiphany Year C)

A Plea for Mercy

When I am brought before the Lord
What can I say to him
How plead for mercy?

I'll say I loved
My husband and the five
Children we had together
Though I was most unworthy

I'll say I loved
The summer mornings
I loved the way the sun comes up
And sets the dew on fire
I loved the way
The cobwebs shine
On the tall grass
When they are strung with dew

I'll say I loved
The way that little bird
The titmouse flies
I'll say I loved
Its lightness
Lilt
And beauty.

-- Anne Porter (1911-2011), American poet, from Living Things: Collected Poems, 2006

A List of Praises

Give praise with psalms that tell the trees to sing,
Give praise with Gospel choirs in storefront churches,
Mad with the joy of the Sabbath,
Give praise with the babble of infants, who wake with the sun,
Give praise with children chanting their skip-rope rhymes,
A poetry not in books, a vagrant mischievous poetry
living wild on the Streets through generations of children. 

Give praise with the sound of the milk-train far away
With its mutter of wheels and long-drawn-out sweet whistle
As it speeds through the fields of sleep at three in the morning,
Give praise with the immense and peaceful sigh
Of the wind in the pinewoods,
At night give praise with starry silences.

Give praise with the skirling of seagulls
And the rattle and flap of sails
And gongs of buoys rocked by the sea-swell
Out in the shipping-lanes beyond the harbor.
Give praise with the humpback whales,
Huge in the ocean they sing to one another.

Give praise with the rasp and sizzle of crickets, katydids and cicadas, 
Give praise with hum of bees,
Give praise with the little peepers who live near water.
When they fill the marsh with a shimmer of bell-like cries
We know that the winter is over. 

 Give praise with mockingbirds, day’s nightingales.
Hour by hour they sing in the crepe myrtle
And glossy tulip trees
On quiet side streets in southern towns.

Give praise with the rippling speech
Of the eider-duck and her ducklings
As they paddle their way downstream
In the red-gold morning
On Restiguche, their cold river,
Salmon river,
Wilderness river.

Give praise with the whitethroat sparrow.
Far, far from the cities,
Far even from the towns,
With piercing innocence
He sings in the spruce-tree tops,
Always four notes
And four notes only.

Give praise with water,
With storms of rain and thunder
And the small rains that sparkle as they dry,
And the faint floating ocean roar
That fills the seaside villages,
And the clear brooks that travel down the mountains

And with this poem, a leaf on the vast flood,
And with the angels in that other country.

--Anne Porter (1911-2011), American poet, from Living Things, 2006

The First of May

Now the smallest creatures, who do not know they have names,
In fields of pure sunshine open themselves and sing.
All over the marshes and in the wet meadows,
Wherever there is water, the companies of peepers
Who cannot count their numbers, gather with sweet shouting.
And the flowers of the woods who cannot see each other
Appear in perfect likeness of one another
Among the weak new shadows on the mossy places.

Now the smallest creatures, who do know themselves by heart,
With all their tender might and roundness of delight
Spending their colors, their myriads and their voices
Praise the moist groung and every winking leaf,
And the new sun that smells of the new streams.

--Anne Porter (1911-2011), American poets, from Living Things: Collected Poems, 2006

Photo: detail of a door at La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.

An Altogether Different Language

There was a church in Umbria, Little Portion,
Already old eight hundred years ago.
It was abandoned and in disrepair
But it was called St. Mary of the Angels
For it was known to be the haunt of angels,
Often at night the country people
Could hear them singing there.

What was it like, to listen to the angels,
To hear those mountain-fresh, those simple voices
Poured out on the bare stones of Little Portion
In hymns of joy? No one has told us.
Perhaps it needs another language
That we have still to learn,
An altogether different language.

--Anne Porter (1911-2011), from An Altogether Different Language (1994)



Image: Santa Maria delle Trosce, Vernazzano, Umbria, Italy.

Leavetaking

Nearing the start of that mysterious last season
Which brings us closer to the close of the other four,
I'm somewhat afraid and don't know how to prepare
So I will praise you.

I will praise you for the glaze on buttercups
And for the pearly scent of wild fresh water
And the great crossbow shapes of swans flying over
With that strong silken threshing sound of wings
Which you gave them when you made them without voices.

And I will praise you for crickets.
On starry autumn nights
When the earth is cooling
Their rusty dimunitive music
Repeated over and over
Is the very marrow of peace.

And I will praise you for the crows calling from treetops
The speech of my first village,
And for the sparrow's flash of song
Flinging me in an instant
The joy of a child who woke
Each morning to the freedom
Of her mother's unclouded love
And lived in it like a country.

And I will praise you that from vacant lots
From only broken glass and candy wrappers
You raise up blue chicory flowers.
I thank you for that secret praise
Which burns in every creature,
And I ask you to bring us to life
Out of every sort of death

And teach us mercy.

-- Anne Porter (1911-2011) from Living Things: Collected Poems, 2006

On the Maine Islands

No one will see

The light-stepping deer

When they come out from the alders

To look for windfalls

In the abandoned orchard.

No one will see the daylilies

The color of red foxes,

Waist-high coarse-textured lilies

That spring from the tumbled stones

Where there was once a farmhouse

And crowd around the cellar-hole

Now thick with raspberry-canes

Where hornets forage.

Mink live here, and voles,

There are seals on the offshore ledges

And herons with their harsh cries

Are nesting up in the woods,

But the man who was down by the shore

Scraping the hull of a boat

The woman feeding her hens

The child playing with fir-cones

Have been gone for a hundred years

And in the still harbor

There is no skiff but ours.

*          *          *

These granite and limestone islands,

These tops of flooded mountains

Are scattered all over the bay

Their clearings shining with wildflowers,

The live coals of hawkweed,

The daisies’ fiery white,

And finespun birdsongs shiver

Over their scraps of forest.

They’re moated with ice-cold channels

Deep enough for a whale,

Where once or twice a summer

With a slow throb of engines

The Swedish freighters go by.

When the sun comes out

The sky speaks blue

And the whole bay

Down to its least cove

Takes on a dazzle of blue,

Becomes a field of splendor.

*          *          *

High up over the harbor

Of the fishing village

On another island

Is St. Mary Star of the Sea,

Built by Italian stonecutters

Who came to work in the quarries

It’s a white frame building

The size of a one-room schoolhouse,

With six milky windows

And a low spire.

Below are the steep-pitched streets

And the fishermen’s wooden houses

With their stacks of lobster pots

Their granite garden walls

And their small gardens flaming

In the short northern summer.

Through St. Mary’s windows

Half open in the summer

We can see the harbor,

The water bluer than larkspur,

The sloping folds of granite.

An old Italian woman

Who gets to Mass early

Has come with dahlias and roses

And the stonecutters’ grandchildren

Carefully chant the Gloria

In their transparent voices

For the one who carved the islands

Has come to live among us,

And this is the house he has chosen,

St. Mary’s Star of the Sea.

--Anne Porter (1911-2011) from Living Things: Collected Poems (2006)

A Short Testament

Whatever harm I may have done
In all my life in all your wide creation
If I cannot repair it
I beg you to repair it,

And then there are all the wounded
The poor the deaf the lonely and the old
Whom I have roughly dismissed
As if I were not one of them.
Where I have wronged them by it
And cannot make amends I ask you
To comfort them to overflowing,

And where there are lives I may have withered around me,
Or lives of strangers far or near
That I’ve destroyed in blind complicity,
And if I cannot find them
Or have no way to serve them,

Remember them. I beg you to remember them

When winter is over
And all your unimaginable promises
Burst into song on death’s bare branches.

--Anne Porter (1911-2011), from Living Things (2006)