Peace

Will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I'll not play hypocrite

To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes, but
That piecemenal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?

O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter. And whn Peace here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,
                                      He comes to brood and sit.

--Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), English poet and Jesuit priest

Jonah

A purple whale
Proudly sweeps his tail
Towards Nineveh;
Glassy green Surges between
A mile of roaring sea.

“O town of gold,
Of splendour multifold,
Lucre and lust,
Leviathan’s eye
Can surely spy
Thy doom of death and dust.”

On curving sands
Vengeful Jonah stands.
“Yet forty days,
Then down, down,
Tumbles the town
In flaming ruin ablaze.”

With swift lament
Those Ninevites repent.
They cry in tears,
“Our hearts fail!”
The whale, the whale!
Our sins prick us like spears.”

Jonah is vexed;
He cries, “What next? what next?”
And shakes his fist.
“Stupid city,
The shame, the pity,
The glorious crash I’ve missed.”

Away goes Jonah grumbling,
Murmuring and mumbling;
Off ploughs the purple whale,
With disappointed tail.

--Robert Graves (1895-1985), from Faeries and Fusiliers, 1918.

Reading 1, Revised Common Lectionary B

Grace of the monk of Farne

Just as a table without bread
is a needy one,
so absence of charity
is ruin to the soul,
for the soul walks by love
and the one who does not love
abides in death.
Bless our full table, Lord.
Help us to supply the need
of others,
and walk in love.
Amen.

--John Whiterig, O.S.B. (1320-1371), monk of Farne (Landisfarne), found in Celtic Daily Prayer Book 2, from the Northumbria Community, p. 1092

A blessing on someone's journey or on a child

I bless you, darling one,
in the name of the Holy Three,
the Father, the Son, and the Sacred Spirit.
May you drink deeply from God's cup of joy. 
May the night bring you quiet.
And when you come
to the Father's palace
may his door be open
and the welcome warm.

--The Northumbria Community, Celtic Daily Prayer, Book One

Sonnet 50: How heavy do I journey on the way

How heavy do I journey on the way,
When what I seek, my weary travel's end,
Doth teach that case and that repose to say,
"Thus far the miles are measured from thy friend!"
The beast that bears me, tired with my woe,
Plods dully on, to bear that weight in me,
As if by some instinct the wretch did know
His rider loved not speed being made from thee.
The bloody spur cannot provoke him on
That sometimes anger thrusts into his hide,
Which heavily he answers with a groan,
More sharp to me than spurring to his side;
For that same groan doth put this in my mind:
My grief lies onward and my joy behind.

--William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
     It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
     It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
     And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
     And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
     There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went--
     Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward springs -
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
     World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

--Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), English poet and Jesuit priest, 1877

Sabbath Poem V, 1980

Six days of work are spent
To make a Sunday quiet
That Sabbath may return.
It comes in unconcern;
We cannot earn or buy it.
Suppose rest is not sent
Or comes and goes unknown,
The light, unseen, unshown.
Suppose the day begins
In wrath at circumstance,
Or anger at one’s friends
In vain self-innocence
False to the very light,
Breaking the sun in half,
Or anger at oneself
Whose controverting will
Would have the sun stand still.
The world is lost in loss
Of patience; the old curse
Returns, and is made worse
As newly justified.
In hopeless fret and fuss,
In rage at worldly plight
Creation is defied,
All order is unpropped,
All light and singing stopped.

--Wendell Berry (1934- ), American poet, novelist, agrarian activist, from This Day: Sabbath Poems New and Collected, 1979-2013, 2013

At the River Clarion

1.
I don't know who God is exactly.
But I'll tell you this.
I was sitting in the river named Clarion, on a
          water splashed stone
and all afternoon I listened to the voices
          of the river talking.
Whenever the water struck the stone it had
          something to say,
and the water itself, and even the mosses trailing
          under the water.
And slowly, very slowly, it became clear to me
          what they were saying.
Said the river: I am part of holiness.
And I, too, said the stone. And I too, whispered
          the moss beneath the water.

I'd been to the river before, a few times.
Don't blame the river that nothing happened quickly.
You don't hear such voices in an hour or a day.
You don't hear them at all if selfhood has stuffed your ears.
And it's difficult to hear anything anyway, through
          all the traffic, and ambition.

2.
If God exists he isn't just butter and good luck.
He's also the tick that killed my wonderful dog Luke.
Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then
          keep on going.
Imagine how the lily (who may also be a part of God)
          would sing to you if it could sing, if
                    you would pause to hear it.
And how are you so certain anyway that it doesn't sing?

If God exists he isn't just churches and mathematics.
He's the forest, he's the desert.
He's the ice caps, that are dying.
He's the ghetto and the Museum of Fine Arts.
He's van Gogh and Allen Ginsberg and Robert
          Motherwell.
He's the many desperate hands, cleaning and preparing
          their weapons.
He's every one of us, potentially.
The leaf of grass, the genius, the politican,
          the poet.
And if this is true, isn't it something very important?

3.
Of course for each of us, there is the daily life.
Let us live it, gesture by gesture.
When we cut the ripe melon, should we not give it thanks?
And should we not thank the knife, also?
We do not live in a simple world.

4.
There was someone I love who grew old and ill.
One by one I watched the fires go out.
There was nothing I could do

except to remember
that we receive
and then we give back.

5.
My dog Luke lies in a grave in the forest,
          and she is given back.
But the river Clarion still flows
          from wherever it comes from
                    to wherever it has been told to go.
I pray for the desperate earth.
I pray for the desperate world.
I do the little each person can do, it isn't much.
Sometimes the river murmurs, sometimes it raves.

6.
Along its shores were, may I say, very intense
          cardinal flowers.
And trees, and birds that have wings to uphold them,
          for heaven's sakes--
the lucky ones: they have such deep natures,
          they are so happily obedient.
While I sit here in a house filled with books,
          ideas, doubts, hesitations.

7.
And still, pressed deep into my mind, the river
          keeps coming, touching me, passing by on its
                    long journey, its pale, infallible voice
                              singing.


--Mary Oliver, (1935- ) from Evidence: Poems, 2009

Questions About Angels

Of all the questions you might want to ask

about angels, the only one you ever hear

is how many can dance on the head of a pin.

No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time

besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin

or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth

or guiding a boy and girl across a rickety wooden bridge.

Do they fly through God's body and come out singing?

Do they swing like children from the hinges

of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards?

Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors?

What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes,

their diet of unfiltered divine light?

What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wall

these tall presences can look over and see hell?

If an angel fell off a cloud, would he leave a hole

in a river and would the hole float along endlessly

filled with the silent letters of every angelic word?

If an angel delivered the mail, would he arrive

in a blinding rush of wings or would he just assume

the appearance of the regular mailman and

whistle up the driveway reading the postcards?

No, the medieval theologians control the court.

The only question you ever hear is about

the little dance floor on the head of a pin

where halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly.

It is designed to make us think in millions,

billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapse

into infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one:

one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,

a small jazz combo working in the background.

She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful

eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over

to glance at his watch because she has been dancing

forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.

--Billy Collins (1941- ), from Questions About Angels, 1991

Winter

A little heat in the iron radiator,

the dog breathing at the foot of the bed,

and the windows shut tight,

encrusted with hexagons of frost.

I can barely hear the geese

complaining in the vast sky,

flying over the living and the dead,

schools and prisons, and the whitened fields.

--Billy Collins (1941- ), from Poetry East, no. 82, 2014