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

A Sonnet Prayer (in memory of Shakespeare)

In gratitude we bow before your grace,
O God, our bulwark and our steadfast shield.
We humbly offer You our thanks and praise,
That love be sown within our hearts, and yield
A hundred-fold, all for your gospel's sake--
That life and hope may rise on eagle's wing,
That we bless all by Christ's clear call, and make
Our lives, for all in need, an offering.
Burnish our souls, O Truth of God, like brass
That we reflect your love that makes us one.
"Let never day nor night unhallowed pass,
But still remember what the Lord hath done;"
Lord Christ, may we walk humbly in your way
And grant your peace upon these souls, we pray.

Amen.

-- LKS, written on the 505th anniversary of Shakespeare's death on this date in 1516.

Memento

We will all leave

                  unfinished business.

pages scattered across a desk

grit on the windowsill

                  where the leaves blow in

laundry at the bottom of the stairs

the fetor of old bacon seeping through the house.

With interminable patience a single white cup

                 endures the dripping faucet.

Your query hangs in the air.

But for a debt paid

a word spoken

a life given

fitly received.

--The Rev. Michael Knowles, poet, preacher, teacher, and cleric in the Anglican Church of Canada, from The Anglican Theological Review, Winter 2020, Volume 102, Number 1

The Idea of Order at Key West

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean. 

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard. 

For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea. 

                            It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour it solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
in ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.


-- Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), American lawyer, businessman, and poet

The Starlight Night

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes!
The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!
Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!
Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!
Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.

Buy then! bid then! — What? — Prayer, patience, alms, vows.
Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!
Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!
These are indeed the barn; withindoors house
The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse
Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

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

A Wild Embrace

How creation dares us into
a wild embrace of what is
too beautiful to ignore. You open
your front door.
Breathe, and all the old dust and confusion
of your life falls behind you.
You are not to obsess about it, 

no matter how it calls you.
Instead, bend and examine
closely how the grass has grown
an inch under last night’s rain,
and the peony buds are swelling,
the tips of pink petals already
bursting free like prisoners
wrongly convicted and now
released. There is such generosity
out there, reaching towards you
with hands open, claiming you,
a created being issuing
from the open mouth of God.

--Luci Shaw (1928- ), poet, editor, and Episcopalian, from The Generosity: Poems (2020).

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

The Widow's Lament in Springtime

Sorrow is my one yard
where the new grass
flames as it has flamed
often before but not
with the cold fire
that closes round me this year.
Thirtyfive years
I lived with my husband. 
The plumtree is white today
with masses of flowers.
Masses of flowers
load the cherry branches 
and color some bushes 
yellow and some red 
but the grief in my heart 
is stronger than they 
for though they were my joy 
formerly, today I notice them 
and turn away forgetting. 
Today my son told me 
that in the meadows, 
at the edge of the heavy woods 
in the distance, he saw 
trees of white flowers. 
I feel that I would like 
to go there 
and fall into those flowers 
and sink into the marsh near them.

--William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), American poet and author

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