Fungus on Fallen Alder at Lookout Creek

     

Florid, fluted, flowery petal, flounce

of a girl’s dress, ruffled fan,
striped in what seems to my simple eye
an excess of extravagance,
intricately ribboned like a secret
code, a colorist’s vision of DNA.
At the outermost edge a scallop
of ivory, then a tweedy russet,
then mouse gray, a crescent
of celadon velvet, a streak of sleek seal brown,
a dark arc of copper, then butter,
then celadon again, again butter, again
copper and on into the center, striped thinner
and thinner to the green, green moss-furry heart.
How can this be necessary?
Yet it grows and is making more
of itself, dozens and dozens of tiny starts, stars
no bigger than a baby’s thumbnail,
all of them sucking one young dead tree
on a gravel bank that will be washed away
in the next flooding winter. But isn’t the air here
cool and wet and almost unbearably sweet?

-- Ellen Bass (1947- ) American poet and  Chancellor Emeritus of the American Academy of Poets

Faith

When I cannot believe,
The brown herds still move across green fields
Into the tufty hills, and I was born
Higher, where I could watch them as a bird might.
When even memory seems imagined, what
Can I bring to prayer? A pair of knees.
The great faith that built a stair to heaven
As now my memory tries to climb a hill,
Becomes an old stone building, a deaf priest
Whose hand is in the pockets of his parish,
Who longs to buy a bell he'll never hear.
The water in the font is cold, I trace
A circle on my brow and not a cross.

-- Michael Schmidt (1947- ) British poet, novelist, and professor

Jesus Feeds the Birds

And it’s not always pretty.

Those lilies clothed in Solomon’s splendor
splotch with the leftover tufts

of field mice. For every hummingbird
darting at an orchid, every goldfinch
nibbling a quivering primrose stalk,

is an osprey disemboweling a flounder
or a golden eagle snapping
a badger’s neck midair. They do not

sow or heap seed heads in barns.
They swoop and pluck
in the moment, just as their meals

suddenly find themselves
sliding down a gullet. Of course I can’t
forget them, the ragged spirits of prey,

the grains and spores that never
had a chance to germinate. The dead
scamper and bloom in the shadow

of my wings, spreading and trailing
in a train of many colors, and oh,
the conversations we have.

-----Tania Runyan, NEA fellow, and poet

Scripture reference: Luke 12:22-31, 11th Sunday after Pentecost C

Easter

Lent gathers up her cloak of sombre shading

   In her reluctant hands.

Her beauty heightens, fairest in its fading,
   As pensively she stands
Awaiting Easter’s benediction falling,
   Like silver stars at night,
Before she can obey the summons calling
   Her to her upward flight,
Awaiting Easter’s wings that she must borrow
   Ere she can hope to fly—
Those glorious wings that we shall see to-morrow
   Against the far, blue sky.
Has not the purple of her vesture’s lining
   Brought calm and rest to all?
Has her dark robe had naught of golden shining
   Been naught but pleasure’s pall?
Who knows? Perhaps when to the world returning
   In youth’s light joyousness,
We’ll wear some rarer jewels we found burning
   In Lent’s black-bordered dress.
So hand in hand with fitful March she lingers
   To beg the crowning grace
Of lifting with her pure and holy fingers
   The veil from April’s face.
Sweet, rosy April—laughing, sighing, waiting
   Until the gateway swings,
And she and Lent can kiss between the grating
   Of Easter’s tissue wings.
Too brief the bliss—the parting comes with sorrow.
   Good-bye dear Lent, good-bye!
We’ll watch your fading wings outlined to-morrow
   Against the far blue sky.

---Tekahionwake (Emily Pauline Johnson) (1961-1913), Canadian-Mohawk poet, Chautauqua speaker, journalist, storyteller, and Indigenous advocate.

Like Jesus to the Crows

    

that gathered there along his arms,
upon the invitation of a slender limb.
And not oblivious to human violence
perhaps needed rest or needed to offer
the succor of presence, despite the
stiff collar of their feathers, despite
each one being no less the children
of a father who claimed an upper realm.

It is not true they pecked his eyes. Nor
did they consider his wounds
their own. They were neither irreverent
nor quiet. They spoke in the tongues
they knew. They cawed full voiced
and would have released him from his
bindings had their beaks held the power
and had there been time in that place.

Like them, I have sought to comfort and
so be comforted. Like them
I have seen the failure of miracles when
they were most needed. Like Him, I
have called upon those so unlike myself
when my father failed to answer.

--- Vievee Francis, poet, professor, and associate  editor of Cullaloo, from Forest Primeval, 2016

Image: Jesus, by Tamàs Kerti, Hungarian artist and 3-D animator

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..."

Her Stations of the Cross

I.

Here mothers move more than others

into Mary’s mourning, each chorus

a soul full of crosses, weighted

with her child dying

continuously in the contemplation

of our contrition.


II. 

That once-upon-a-time angel’s voice

stretching anew her middle-aged womb,

she who once sang Magnify, O Magnify,

when all she screams for now

is mercy in her urgent rebirth

of sorrow.

III. 

When he stumbles,

she cannot fix his fall,

cannot cradle the boyhood

scrapes and bruises bleeding

into crowd-sanctioned murder.

No cock crows; she hears his groans

as if the world’s bones

are splintering within her.

 

IV. 

Besides the tree, he carries

the tears of the one who carried him

beneath her Eve ribs, lifted him

into a world he breathed as good,

gone now into this God-crucified-

as-her-son catastrophe

for salvation’s sake.

V. 

Simon of Cyrene stands close

Understanding too well the two sorrows—

mother and son helpless to comfort the other—

he heaves up and shoulders

the burdens of both,

his back the black tablet

of Moses’ commandments fulfilled

to the jot and tittle.

VI. 

Veronica—eyes swollen

for the Madonna and Child

wrenched from their rightful honor—

lifts her veil to cool the Savior’s pain,

alleviate, however slightly, a mother’s anguish.

VII. 

Thorns gouge the brow she stroked. 

The sweat-caked man that came out of her 

stumbles again. Already,

the sharp nails gnaw her own palms.

VIII. 

Oh, daughters of Jerusalem,

your tears sweep the streets,

wet the weary soles of Mary.

Weep for your own children

forever dashing away from Yahweh.

 

IX. 

Wretched stones that tip her sinless child,

dirt that drives down the innocent son.

His own earth hurts him more each tumble.

Three times he trips,

crashes to the dust we are,

mortal muscles turning their backs

on Man and his Mother.


X. 

Threads twisted by her own fingers,

tugged carefully through cloth:

this is the tunic they rip from him,

fabric tattooed with red;

she remembers his baby body

blood-splattered and matted.

XI. 

Her soul stabbed by the tree

that slays her son. Her heart nailed.

She swears his life spurts

from her barely breathing body.

XII. 

Death is indigo and indelible, 

the Roman sky collapsed and re-scribbled

on the shreds of her memories.

She cannot bear to look upon his face

when breath forgets its maker.

XIII. 

Ten thousand stillborns better

than this: his torso in her arms, 

icon of the inconsolable,

the flesh Pietà with its nails of pain, 

pounding, pounding. 

XIV. 

The hewn tomb seals her grief.

She remembers his first words,

his final prayer. All else rots

within her. They swaddle him,

implant him quickly behind stone. 


-- Marjorie Maddox (1959- ), American poet, editor, children's book and short story author, and teacher,  from Weeknights at the Cathedral (2006)

Sonnet: Prayer

     

Was it in Sunday school that we were taught
That prayer only counted when by rote;
This notion somehow lodged deep when we thought
To talk to God as if reciting quotes?
The words staccato sounds in breathless rhymes-- 
To bless our relatives, while half-asleep;
Confessing each day’s sins with guilty minds;
The fear of “praying God our souls to keep.”

We never thought that God might answer back.
We never thought to listen without words:
To feel God’s hand in midnight’s sacred black,
To hear God’s blessing in the song of birds,
To make a grateful bowl within each heart,
To practice prayer as welcome and as art.

------------------Leslie Barnes Scoopmire, 2025

Postcommunion Prayer

     

Lord our God, 

you feed us in this life with bread from heaven,
the pledge and foreshadowing of future glory.
Grant that the working of this sacrament within us
may bear fruit in our daily lives;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

--Katharine Tynan (1861-1931) Irish playwright, author, and poet

Refugee Blues

Jewish refugees flowing Hitler aboard the M. S. St. Louis in 1939. They were turned away in Ellisville Europe, Cuba, and the US.

    

Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.

Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you’ll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew;
Old passports can’t do that, my dear, old passports can’t do that.

The consul banged the table and said:
“If you’ve got no passport, you’re officially dead”;
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.

Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go today, my dear, but where shall we go today?

Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said:
“If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread”;
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.

Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;
It was Hitler over Europe, saying: “They must die”;
O we were in his mind, my dear, O we were in his mind.

Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in:
But they weren’t German Jews, my dear, but they weren’t German Jews.

Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.

Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren’t the human race, my dear, they weren’t the human race.

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors;
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.

Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.

---W. H. Auden (1907- 1973) seminal British-American poet, and Pulitzer Prize winner for The Age of Anxiety. He wrote this poem in 1939 in response to the flood of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany and being turned away throughout Europe and even in the United States.

You can learn more about the M.S. St. Louis here and here.