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.

A Miracle for Breakfast

At six o'clock we were waiting for coffee, 

waiting for coffee and the charitable crumb
that was going to be served from a certain balcony
—like kings of old, or like a miracle.
It was still dark. One foot of the sun
steadied itself on a long ripple in the river.

The first ferry of the day had just crossed the river.
It was so cold we hoped that the coffee
would be very hot, seeing that the sun
was not going to warm us; and that the crumb
would be a loaf each, buttered, by a miracle.
At seven a man stepped out on the balcony.

He stood for a minute alone on the balcony
looking over our heads toward the river.
A servant handed him the makings of a miracle,
consisting of one lone cup of coffee
and one roll, which he proceeded to crumb,
his head, so to speak, in the clouds—along with the sun.

Was the man crazy? What under the sun
was he trying to do, up there on his balcony!
Each man received one rather hard crumb,
which some flicked scornfully into the river,
and, in a cup, one drop of the coffee.
Some of us stood around, waiting for the miracle.

I can tell what I saw next; it was not a miracle.
A beautiful villa stood in the sun
and from its doors came the smell of hot coffee.
In front, a baroque white plaster balcony
added by birds, who nest along the river,
—I saw it with one eye close to the crumb—

and galleries and marble chambers. My crumb
my mansion, made for me by a miracle,
through ages, by insects, birds, and the river
working the stone. Every day, in the sun,
at breakfast time I sit on my balcony
with my feet up, and drink gallons of coffee.

We licked up the crumb and swallowed the coffee.
A window across the river caught the sun
as if the miracle were working, on the wrong balcony.


-- Elizabeth Bishop, American poet.

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that-pierced-died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

-- John Updike (1932-2009), American novelist and poet

Cana, or Not a Perfect Carpenter

"They have no wine."-- John 2:3 
"Like us in all things but sin."-- Hebrews 4:15 

It had to come from somewhere. Expectations 
have histories. Out of the blue one does 
not say, “They have no wine,” as though 
remarking on the gathering of the clouds, or how 
late the spring this year. Surely she knew 
before she came. Had he bent more 
than nails, as he hammered the oak plank, 
cut too short for the table top,

and turning to be sure the door was closed, 
had he, in a stolen moment, lengthen
it an inch or two, a quick 
impatient wonder to cover his mistake?

But through the lattice, had she seen, 
smiled and understood. Had she asked 
him to build a porch with beams from Lebanon, 
where she could catch the breeze, watch

the sun go down? Then as the hard 
wood rafters began to drop, 
did he twist the law of gravity, put 
a kink in the path of falling timbers?

And did she duck – and marvel?

-- Fr. Kilian McDonnell, OSB (1921- ), American monk, poet, and theologian at St. John's Abbey.

Relevant Scripture, John 2:1-11, 2nd after Epiphany C

Look!

As we learned how to read, were we 
beginning to forget to look, 
our young eyes caught in tangles of print 
so that imagination was choked? Were we 
trapped at that remove from ourselves? 

Or did we begin to see a new way, with eyes 
that widened in the amazement of reverie, 
memory, invention? As we peered 
between the words, could we make out 
shapes and colors beyond them?

What did our inside eyes make of 
the black marks on creamy paper, on onionskin? 
A dream of angels turned real, perhaps. 
A wooden boat on a lake. Three small loaves 
fragmented to fill all those empty mouths 

and baskets. Or this: a blind man 
opening his eyes so that the first face he sees -
a vision, surely - is Christ's, spittle 
still shining on the quick fingers, 
his mouth saying urgently, Look! 

—Luci Shaw (1928- ) from Accompanied by Angels: Poems of the Incarnation

Abba Jacob and Miracles

One day Abba Jacob
was praying in a sunbeam
by the door in his underground cell,
and the brethren came to him
to ask him about miracles.
One of the elders said,
My mother's spirit came back
and turned out all the lights
the night we gathered for her wake:
Was that a miracle?
Another said, One spring evening
a white rainbow of mist
passed over our heads:
Was that a miracle?
They went on like this
for several hours.
Abba Jacob listened.
Then there was silence.

Big deal,
said Abba Jacob.
Miracles happen all the time.
We're here, aren't we?

-- Marilyn Nelson (1946-), poet, teacher, and children's book author, former poet laureate of Connecticut, from Poems of Gratitude, 2017