I Saw Him Standing

Under the dark trees, there he stands,
there he stands; shall he not draw my eyes?
I thought I knew a little
how he compels, beyond all things, but now
he stands there in the shadows. It will be
Oh, such a daybreak, such bright morning,
when I shall wake to see him
as he is.

He is called Rose of Sharon, for his skin
is clear, his skin is flushed with blood,
his body lovely and exact; how he compels
beyond ten thousand rivals. There he stands,
my friend, the friend of guilt and helplessness,
to steer my hollow body
over the sea.

The earth is full of masks and fetishes,
what is there here for me? are these like him?
Keep company with him and you will know:
no kin, no likeness to those empty eyes.
he is a stranger to them all, great Jesus.
What is there here for me? I know
what I have longed for. Him to hold me always.



--Ann Griffiths (1776-1805), Welsh Methodist, farmer’s daughter and wife in mid North Wales, considered to be one of the greatest Welsh religious poets and hymnist who died in childbirth at age 29. Translated from Welsh by former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.

Emmaus

We never come to know
completely
never for sure

It appears
but it doesn't

The heart burned
but it grew chilly

Is it Him
He remains silent
Is it You
He disappears

There is just bread
hands and a gesture

The face always different
always a new face

The evening is drawing near
and the day bows
It's the time of rest
water wine bread

Why didn't you ask directly
didn't seize h

His legs
didn't hold His hands
didn't tie shadow to bench

We stand thus
the disciples

who didn't get to Emmaus
our arms heavy
with amazement

Was it Him
It was
For sure
Where

The night swept away the traces
Let us evermore quickly
carry to the others
the certainty of doubt




-- Anna Kamienska (1920-1986), Polish Roman Catholic poet, children’s book author, translator and writer, from Astonishments: Selected Poems of Anna Kamiekanska, edited and translated by Grazyna Drabik and David Curzon

Image: photo from Washington National Cathedral
Lectionary Scripture: Luke 24:13-35, Easter 3A

Easter Absolutes

Disaster lurks in Easter absolutes,
The sun is straining blood through time,
Heaven, is innocence so far away?
Hell, are you gaping in your fury?

To think, to feel, to see, to be 

Control confusion and force dispute 

Cringing before the cold, glad Easter
Where dwell the ruthless relatives. 

Heavens of contemplation, and first
Belief, that runs lamb-like here, 

Give me the order of the soul's sway

And harmony that teaches mastery. 

Christ now come from out the tomb, 

None other, and walk upon the ruined meadows, 

Dream-like vision, powerful beyond reality,

Where the spirit is jocund, where it would go.


--Richard Eberhart

Easter in the Field

                              I

The staggering cross and grief united us
When Pilate washed his irritated palms; 

Embracing in scarlet garments then, we came 

In the expansion of our tears to this 

Revision of the way: with lofty hands 

To tend the stitch of scars, to go abroad 

In the wet shine of morning under God
With protocol and sword to win these lands.

                              II

Came trotting through the Roman countryside 

A horse with feathers like a cockatoo, 

When horse and rider, both neurotic, threw
Themselves upon the blazing scrub and cried;
For high in evening's undiminished west 

A sensual heart, depending on the earth,
Towards that dark creature and St. Paul came forth;
And when they rode from there, the heart rode first.

                              III

Where they are riding now is ever lost; 

But when the charcoal cross sinks in the year
And fields that wear old leaves and thorny gear 

Are swept like a proscenium of dust, 

In renovations of some glad disguise
Children and dandelions suddenly
Will lease the rooms of summer from the sky
And everywhere the lost unblessed will rise. 

                              IV

Though coming forth were death we would arise,
Since resurrection is our signature; 

Though coming forth, disputing and unsure, 

But starts old wheels and old futilities, 

We ride the season carelessly, still glad 

To dance with blushing Christ and make a rope
Of daisies for his black top-hat and cape,
To preach his legends while we dress our dead.

-- John Malcolm Brinnin

Resurrection

What became of the many others like us
That first Easter morning
Who stared out the back windows of their houses
With blank cups of coffee in their hands
And saw nothing but overcast skies and leafless trees
And weeping weather that mourned for Spring
And did not hear a knock at the door
Or receive a telephone call
From a recently deceased loved one
Or pass Him along the road to an ancient city
Or see the sun rise up from a hole in the earth
Like Hosanna


—Stephen Rybicki (1941-2022), poet and librarian.

Image: Jose Luis Castrillo, "Et Resurrecit II"

Stephen to Lazarus

But was I the first martyr, who
Gave up no more than life, while you,
Already free among the dead,
Your rags stripped off, your fetters shed,
Surrendered what all other men
Irrevocably keep, and when
Your battered ship at anchor lay
Seemingly safe in the dark bay
No ripple stirs, obediently
Put out a second time to sea
Well knowing that your death (in vain
Died once) must all be died again?


--C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) English author, poet, and Christian apologist

I Lazarus

What could I make of the grass

But a gate to the skies
Looking up
Clouds floating by
Like the shapes of the dead ones
As radiant as angels
And when I opened the earth
Their tombs were all empty
My mother and father
The first to speak
Come here son
O how we missed you
All I could do was weep


— Stephen Rybicki (1941-2022), poet and librarian, from Commonweal magazine.

Onto a Vast Plain

You are not surprised at the force of the storm–
you have seen it growing.
The trees flee. Their flight
sets the boulevards streaming. And you know:
he whom they flee is the one
you move toward. All your senses
sing him, as you stand at the window.

The weeks stood still in summer.
The trees’ blood rose. Now you feel
it wants to sink back
into the source of everything. You thought
you could trust that power
when you plucked the fruit:
now it becomes a riddle again
and you again a stranger.

Summer was like your house: you know
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.
The days go numb, the wind
sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.

Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.

– Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), Austrian poet and novelist, from The Book of Hours, translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows

Scripture Reference: John 11:1-45, Lent 5A

Image: "Jesus Raises Lazarus from the Dead," by Ann Lukesh

Lazarus Risen

Lumbering out into the hectic light
like some dishevelled beast, I found myself
notorious, and would have turned back
but that cool and candid gaze unstitched
my shroud till it fell in shreds about me
and I walked among my weeping, bewildered kin.

Now their houses fall silent when I enter,
whey-faced and hesitant. For miles around
kids run howling home at the sound of my name
and when I pass even the trees look askance.
Sustained by a miracle, like flowers in a vase
my astonishing life continues in parenthesis.

Daily, strangers beat on my door.
How should I expect them to understand
my need for darkened rooms and blankets?
I still remember
Barabbas, drunk, circling the cross as blood
issued like a parable no one understood.

When they buried him I hid and waited
and saw his ragged body bleach the stones
and vanish. My arms hung like questions in the air.
They say my wits disdained that brusque choir
and smile at the familiar idiocy
that drives me now to watch in the evenings

the unearthly procession of light
from the grey loaves of the cemetery.
I think of silences broken only
by flesh loosening, the dry applause of bones,
while with growing confidence the spiky stars
transmit their small, post-dated fires.

–Peter Sirr, from Selected Poems(2005)

Scripture reference: John 11:1-45, Lent 5A

Resurrection

Long, long, long ago;
Way before this winter’s snow
First fell upon these weathered fields;
I used to sit and watch and feel
And dream of how the spring would be,
When through the winter’s stormy sea
She’d raise her green and growing head,
Her warmth would resurrect the dead.

Long before this winter’s snow
I dreamt of this day’s sunny glow
And thought somehow my pain would pass
With winter’s pain, and peace like grass
Would simply grow. (But) The pain’s not gone.
It’s still as cold and hard and long
As lonely pain has ever been,
It cuts so deep and fear within.

Long before this winter’s snow
I ran from pain, looked high and low
For some fast way to get around
Its hurt and cold. I’d have found,
If I had looked at what was there,
That things don’t follow fast or fair.
That life goes on, and times do change,
And grass does grow despite life’s pains.

Long before this winter’s snow
I thought that this day’s sunny glow,
The smiling children and growing things
And flowers bright were brought by spring.
Now, I know the sun does shine,
That children smile, and from the dark, cold, grime
A flower comes. It groans, yet sings,
And through its pain, its peace begins.

--Mary Ann Bernard, from Reuben Job and Norman Shawchuck, eds., A Guide To Prayer (Nashville: The Upper Room), p. 144.

At Thomas Merton's Grave

We can never be with loss too long.

Behind the warped door that sticks,
the wood thrush calls to the monks,
pausing upon the stone crucifix,
singing: “I am marvelous alone!”
Thrash, thrash goes the hayfield:
rows of marrow and bone undone.
The horizon’s flashing fastens tight,
sealing the blue hills with vermilion.
Moss dyes a squirrel’s skull green.
The cemetery expands its borders—
little milky crosses grow like teeth.
How kind time is, altering space
so nothing stays wrong; and light,
more new light, always arrives.

-- Spencer Reece (1963- ), Episcopal priest and poet

Image: The Dalai Lama at Merton's grave, 1997

Chorus VI from The Rock

VI

 
It is hard for those who have never known persecution,
And who have never known a Christian,
To believe these tales of Christian persecution.
It is hard for those who live near a Bank
To doubt the security of their money.
It is hard for those who live near a Police Station
To believe in the triumph of violence.
Do you think that the Faith has conquered the World
And that lions no longer need keepers?
Do you need to be told that whatever has been, can still be?
Do you need to be told that even such modest attainments
As you can boast in the way of polite society
Will hardly survive the Faith to which they owe their significance?
Men! polish your teeth on rising and retiring;
Women! polish your fingernails:
You polish the tooth of the dog and the talon of the cat.
Why should men love the Church? Why should they love her laws?
She tells them of Life and Death, and of all that they would forget.
She is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft.
She tells them of Evil and Sin, and other unpleasant facts.
They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is will shadow
The man that pretends to be.
And the Son of Man was not crucified once for all,
The blood of the martyrs not shed once for all,
The lives of the Saints not given once for all:
But the Son of Man is crucified always
And there shall be Martyrs and Saints.
And if blood of Martyrs is to flow on the steps
We must first build the steps;
And if the Temple is to be cast down
We must first build the Temple.

-- T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), Anglo-American Modernist poet and Nobel Prize winner in literature, from his play The Rock.


Image: Crucifixion at La Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, 2015

Resurrection

My friend a writer and scientist

has retreated to a monastery
where he has submitted himself
out of exhaustion to not knowing.
He’s been thinking about
the incarnation a.k.a. Big Bang
after hearing a monk’s teaching
that crucifixion was not the hard part
for Christ. Incarnation was.
How to squeeze all of that
all-of-that into a body. I woke
that Easter to think of the Yaqui
celebrations taking place in our city
the culminating ritual of the Gloria
when the disruptive spirits
with their clacking daggers and swords
are repelled from the sanctuary
by women and children
throwing cottonwood leaves and confetti
and then my mother rose
in me rose from the anguish
of her hospice bed a woman
who expected to direct all the action
complaining to her nurse
I’ve been here three days
and I’m not dead yet—not ready
at one hundred and two to give up
control even to giving up control.
I helped with the morphine clicker.
Peace peace peace the stilling
at her throat the hazel eye
become a glassy marble. Yet here she is
an Easter irreverent still rising
to dress in loud pastels
and turn me loose
in Connecticut woods to hunt
my basket of marshmallow eggs
jelly beans and chocolate rabbit
there fakeries of nature made vestal
incarnated in their nest of shiny manufactured grass.

--Alison Hawthorne Deming (1945- ), American poet and essayist

Late Easter, Spring Come Lately

She, supposing him to be the gardener, saith unto him, Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.

In one of John Donne’s under-read
hymns, on his sickness, he claims one place
held Paradise and Calvary—Adam’s disgrace,
too: over whose tree we choose instead

the cross of the tender forester.
He tended there by virtue of his blood
the ancient ruin of that prior wood.
(Its seed was left in Adam’s mouth at first,

by Seth, as legend has it, or so it goes.)
And so the fevered poet felt the sweat
of elder Adam, even as his soul met
in extremity new Adam in clothes

fit for cultivation. Lilied fields exhibit
still some aboriginal greenhouse of Love.
It’s enough to make one’s mind flutter over
another poet full of holy ambition,

who borrowed lilies from a deceased
imperial nephew, scraped the epic
sadness from their petals. He quickly
tuned them to a better season,

while with great reasonableness
his blessed one arrived by chariot,
clad in green and red, his fair excoriator.
Her lesson? Hope should be unceasing,
yet stern as a plunger that excavates
those parasitic sins from any scrounging,
gaunt-faced pilgrim. Then the longed-
for orbit commenced, longing sated.

His soul became both wholly full,
yet pulled by fiercer hunger from folly
toward heaven’s center, ultimate pole,
temple where God welcomes fools.

--Brett Foster (1973-2015), American poet, Renaissance scholar, and teacher,  from Image Journal

Image: Noli Me Tangere, Grant Sutherland, Chichester Cathedral

Noli Me Tangere: San Marco, Florence

Outside this cell the sparrows repeat
their seasonal songs.
Here a fresco to teach the soul
the same lesson over and over.

I come often. I think
of the monk who, each morning, faced
the grief of reaching out for what is always
just out of reach.

Just the other side
of Mary's outstretched hands,
Christ's trailing hand serenely denies.
His lightened body leaves no footprints

in the grass. For too many years
I have seen your hands laid at your sides,
your face which left me nothing
I could say.

In this cell, I see the monk’s breath
following him as he walks.
I see how Mary keeps
entering the solitudes of grief,

her hands filling with memory
as one by one by one
those last perfect words drift beyond
her understanding.


--Robert Cording, (1949- ), American poet and teacher, from A Word in My Mouth: Selected Spiritual Poems

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

Poem: The Legend of the Dogwood Tree

In Jesus' time, the dogwood grew 
To a stately size and a lovely hue. 

'Twas strong & firm it's branches interwoven 
For the cross of Christ its timbers were chosen. 

Seeing the distress at this use of their wood 
Christ made a promise which still holds good: 

"Never again shall the dogwood grow
Large enough to be used so

Slender & twisted, it shall be
With blossoms like the cross for all to see.

As blood stains the petals marked in brown
The blossom's center wears a thorny crown.

All who see it will remember me
Crucified on a cross from the dogwood tree. 

Cherished and protected this tree shall be
A reminder to all of my agony."

--Unknown

Easter Hymn

If in that Syrian garden, ages slain, 
You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain, 
Nor even in dreams behold how dark and bright 
Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night 
The hate you died to quench and could but fan, 
Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.

But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by, 
At the right hand of majesty on high You sit, 
and sitting so remember yet Your tears, 
your agony and bloody sweat, 
Your cross and passion and the life you gave, 
Bow hither out of heaven and see and save.

--A. E Housman (1859-1935), English Classical scholar and poet

Lazarus

Now that he's gone
Now the world has moved on 
Since he called my name nothing's the same
As my sister cried He said, "Lazarus rise."
To love and anoint
Or just prove a point

I'm the one that he saved
I'm the one that he raised
From a dark quiet sleep from peace of the grave
I'm the one who owns much but that no one will touch
Mothers see me and cry
Dogs bare teeth as I walk by

I don't see a veil between heaven and hell
The truth is there's nothing but a warm light and singing
But here in-between a voice haunts my dreams
Martha does what she can but won't look at my hands

I'm the one that he saved
I'm the one that he raised
From a dark quiet sleep from peace of the grave
I'm the one who owns much but that no one will touch
Mothers see me and cry
Dogs bare teeth as I walk by

I love the cool mornings
I love a hot meal
The pulse of the street night jasmine and clean sheets 
I can't sleep of rest I feel lost and hard pressed 
I wander these rooms still looking for you 
Now I ought to be grateful to drink from the grail
But I don't be belong on either side of this veil
I look down at my hands that are clasped in my lap
When he left this world I thought he'd take me back...

-- Carrie Newcomer, American singer-songwriter, from the album The Geography of Light

Scripture reference: John 11:1-45, 5th Sunday in Lent 

Forest Sonnet, Whidbey Island

"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.

--L. K. S., written after forest bathing while reading Hopkins, December 6, 2019