St. Dismas

 

St. Dismas

I think of you as the prince carried home, lord, lion
With a thorn mane riding on the thumbs
Of hunters in the black air smiling,
So hungry. You’re bleeding. I need to believe in
So I believe in your blood, the long down-rivers of your waist.
Listen, is this how fathers love?
I hear your chest try to escape its ruined field,
I hear how your cheek lolls in the dark
Of your neck. Forgive parts the dry lips, lord,
Can we all live in that murmur, the slight press of tooth
To tongue. Do we speak to them, down there? Spit and split
The moonlight. Your mother’s hands float on our feet like water.
I want that you remember me when you get there,
Take me through the shock, roped by biceps,
Already part way up the sky.
Who dies first. Who dies in the lanternlight swinging.
I begin to love you deep
In the valve your father pinned
In my heart

-- Eve Jones, poet, photographer, and professor at Lindenwood University (MFA UMSL), from Dappled Things journal

39One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, "Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!" 40But the other rebuked him, saying, "Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? 41And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong." 42Then he said, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." 43He replied, "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise."-- Luke 23:39-43

Scripture Reference: Luke 22:14-23:56 (The Passion Narrative), Palm/Passion Sunday, Good Friday; Reign of Christ C Proper 29C

Image: Remember Me, Barbara de Reus Kamma, New Guinean/Dutch, chamois leather and scrap wood, story can be found here at artway.eu.

Taize: "Jesus, Remember Me..."

The Agony & The Garden

 

i.
Now all he dreams are ropes,
sees them in the trees at the beginning of
the world: grim slide of vines
through first light
throat-tails dangled, mother-arms,
an instinct of the hand to twist, like a heart,
around what it holds.

ii.
Half his heart is a campfire.
Father, he begins, father,—
He stands there and the black gears of night lurch
through sand. On the other side of the hill olive trees
descend into questions, into women, into merchants,
into emperor flesh, into pottery, into bread, into a child’s
mouth, into a waltz, into the printing press, into thermometers,
into sighing gardens, into motion pictures, into
glass, into bedposts, into soup, into car exhaust, into rain,
into glaciers, into unread letters, into ATMs.

Father, the wind. The ordinary life.

iii.
He does not understand women,
was given no glimpse or direction. He only
knows the world unfolds from their robes the way
wine spills from a cup.

He knows they sometimes take the form of angels,
and they will take the bruised form of saints,
and celestial bodies,
they are like long roads, the hushed underneck
of a swan, and they reach, wanting
to know you, palms uncoiling
past
you in ecstasy.

iv.
It’s the nightmare again in which his feet
are splinters, and his mother is gasping,
and his face peels off onto linen,
and his father watches him from a night tree,
and there is some great secret he must shove
up the hill, to the sky,
where he is loved, loved
only by thieves.

v.
The world lights a broken man.
And the apparition he sweats beside,
realized into angel, into lamp, how it
bears him as the soldiers push
their way through blackness, through
the olives, thistle, and his dark-eyed heart,
a dinghy tossed in another life’s dream.
Far rain on the ocean, where a father is nowhere
to be found. If grace is the fixed star
we long for, the good disciples must sleep their parts,
hands folded on their hearts like oak
doors. Somewhere at the hillfoot the crossmaker
is roping beams in his shop’s
half-light. So they come and they come
in their armor, mirroring moonlight.
Now the moon opens on his heel.
The moon is the scent of a shy girl’s letter.
When they stand, and they stand, her feather tips
brush the wall.


-- Eve Jones, poet, photographer, former instructor at Lindenwood University, from Dappled Things journal.

Scripture reference: Matthew 26:31-41; Mark 14:27-37; (The Passion Liturgy, years A and B)

Image: Christ on the Mount of Olives, Paul Gauguin, 1889

Oratorio: Christ on the Mount of Olives, Op. 85, Ludwig van Beethoven, UC Davis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus

 

Goliath of Gath (Excerpt)

David undaunted thus, “Thy spear and shield
Shall no protection to thy body yield:
Jehovah’s name——no other arms I bear,
I ask no other in this glorious war.
To-day the Lord of Hosts to me will give
Vict’ry, to-day thy doom thou shalt receive;
The fate you threaten shall your own become,
And beasts shall be your animated tomb,
That all the earth’s inhabitants may know
That there’s a God, who governs all below:
This great assembly too shall witness stand,
That needs nor sword, nor spear, th’ Almighty’s hand:
The battle his, the conquest he bestows,
And to our pow’r consigns our hated foes.”

Thus David spoke; Goliath heard and came
To meet the hero in the field of fame.
Ah! fatal meeting to thy troops and thee,
But thou wast deaf to the divine decree;
Young David meets thee, meets thee not in vain;
’Tis thine to perish on th’ ensanguin’d plain.

And now the youth the forceful pebble flung,
Philistia trembled as it whizz’d along:
In his dread forehead, where the helmet ends,
Just o’er the brows the well-aim’d stone descends,
It pierc’d the skull, and shatter’d all the brain,
Prone on his face he tumbled to the plain:
Goliath’s fall no smaller terror yields
Than riving thunders in aerial fields:
The soul still ling’red in its lov’d abode,
Till conq’ring David o’er the giant strode:
Goliath’s sword then laid its master dead,
And from the body hew’d the ghastly head;
The blood in gushing torrents drench’d the plains,
The soul found passage through the spouting veins.

And now aloud th’ illustrious victor said,
“Where are your boastings now your champion’s dead?”
Scarce had he spoke, when the Philistines fled:
But fled in vain; the conqu’ror swift pursu’d:
What scenes of slaughter! and what seas of blood!
There Saul thy thousands grasp’d th’ impurpled sand
In pangs of death the conquest of thine hand;
And David there were thy ten thousands laid:
Thus Israel’s damsels musically play’d.

Near Gath and Ekron many an hero lay,
Breath’d out their souls, and curs’d the light of day:
Their fury, quench’d by death, no longer burns,
And David with Goliath’s head returns,
To Salem brought, but in his tent he plac’d
The load of armour which the giant grac’d.
His monarch saw him coming from the war,
And thus demanded of the son of Ner.
“Say, who is this amazing youth?” he cry’d,
When thus the leader of the host reply’d;
“As lives thy soul I know not whence he sprung,
So great in prowess though in years so young:”
“Inquire whose son is he,” the sov’reign said,
“Before whose conq’ring arm Philistia fled.”
Before the king behold the stripling stand,
Goliath’s head depending from his hand:
To him the king: “Say of what martial line
“Art thou, young hero, and what sire was thine?”
He humbly thus; “The son of Jesse I:
“I came the glories of the field to try.
Small is my tribe, but valiant in the fight;
Small is my city, but thy royal right.”
“Then take the promis’d gifts,” the monarch cry’d,
Conferring riches and the royal bride:
“Knit to my soul for ever thou remain
With me, nor quit my regal roof again.”

--Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784), first African American to publish a book of poetry (Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, 1773) in the colonies. She was freed after publishing her book of poetry, but died poor and in obscurity.

Scripture reference and lectionary text for Proper 7B: 1 Samuel 17:1a, 4-11, 19-23, 32-49