Tasting Life Twice

Archive for the category “Poetry”

21 Jul 2011
8 Comments

It Was Early

The following is a beautiful poem from Mary Oliver.  I especially like the recognition that the place wherever we stand is already a place of blessing. 

——-

It was early,
which has always been my hour
to be looking
at the world

and of course,
even in the darkness,
to begin listening to it,

especially
under the pines
where the owl lives
and sometimes calls out

as I walk by,
as he did
on this morning.
So many gifts!

What do they mean?
In the marshes
where the pink light
was just arriving

the mink
with his bristle tail
was stalking
the soft-eared mice,

and in the pines
the cones were heavy
each one
ordained to open.

Sometimes I need
only to stand
wherever I am
to be blessed.

Little mink, let me watch you.
Little mice, run and run.
Dear pine cone, let me hold you
as you open.

Posted in Poetry and tagged , ,
12 Apr 2010

The Guardian of the Orphans

Speaking of Dr. Janusz Korczak, this morning I came across a poem written as a tribute to his bravery.  It comes from Wladyslaw Szlengel who is remembered as “the poet of the ghetto.”  He died in the Warsaw Uprising in April 1943. 

On this battlefield where death does not sanctify,

In this nightmare dance in the night,

There was one proud soldier,

Janusz Korczak, the guardian of the Orphans.

Do you hear, you neighbors behind the wall,

Who watch us die through the bars of our cage?

Janus Korzcak died

So that we, too, could have our honor.

Posted in Poetry and tagged , , , | Leave a Comment
25 Feb 2010

Wendell Berry – Leavings

 

I’m on the way home from Louisville where I attended a grant consultation with The Louisville Institute.  I’ve enjoyed some fine southern food (including bread pudding and Derby pie), smooth Kentucky bourbon and the company of some wonderfully curious people. 

Tim from Canada is preparing to bike across the nation of Canada with his family of a wife and three boys.  He will leave from Vancouver and trek east to St. Johns, Newfoundland.  Rich from Des Moines has always wanted to see the Rockies by train.  He is preparing to take Amtrak through Denver to Sacramento before returning on a different line through the Dakotas and on to Chicago.  He is going to look out the window and pay attention to the landscapes. Talitha is researching the notion of ‘home’ and the nature of desert spirituality in the austerity of the American southwest.  Peter is looking at what has resulted from a more recent dynamic in the Canadian prairies where immigrant pastors (Korean, Congolese) are ministering at traditional, rural churches in the heartland.  Candy is going to the Philippines and Japan to visit the places where her late father was held captive during World War II.  He survived the Bataan Death march and terrible suffering as a POW, and only late in life did he share his story with others.  Candy is making a trip in order to connect the stories to place.  Ron is taking his camera to Ireland and Scotland and is spending his sabbatical time focusing on prayer and photography.  And these are just a few of the remarkable stories I heard over food and drink. 

As a group we were privileged to hear Wendell Berry and Norman Wirzba talk about the gift of rest in a culture obsessed with speed and control and busyness.

I first started reading Berry’s work as a student at Regent College.  Eugene Peterson included The Unsettling of America on our reading list for “Ministry and Spirituality”. He himself had made the habit of reading Berry and replacing“farm” with “parish” as a way of learning pastoral ministry and paying attention to the local conditions where our work takes place.

Berry gave a reading from his latest book of poems, Leavings.  Here is an excerpt:

Posted in Curiosity's Trail, Poetry, Road Trips and tagged , , ,
06 Sep 2009

Dreamers After Dark – The Poetic Imagination

At church I’ve been teaching on the gospel as “story” and the imaginative character of faith (“seeing that which is unseen” – Hebrews 11:1).  These lines from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s epic poem Aurora Leigh (1856) help make the point (props to Laura for sending this my way). 

——————–

What’s this, Aurora Leigh,
You write so of the poets, and not laugh?
Those virtuous liars, dreamers after dark,
Exaggerators of the sun and moon,
And soothsayers in a tea-cup?
I write so
Of the only truth-tellers, now left to God,-
The only speakers of essential truth,
Posed to relative, comparative,
And temporal truths; the only holders by
His sun-skirts, through conventional grey glooms;
The only teachers who instruct mankind,
From just a shadow on a charnel wall,
To find man’s veritable stature out,
Erect, sublime,-the measure of a man,
And that’s the measure of an angel, says
The apostle. Ay, and while your common men
Build pyramids, gauge railroads, reign, reap, dine,
And dust the flaunty carpets of the world
For kings to walk on, or our senators,
The poet suddenly will catch them up
With his voice like a thunder.  ‘This is soul,
This is life, this word is being said in heaven,
Here’s God down on us! what are you about?
How all those workers start amid their work,
Look round, look up, and feel, a moment’s space,
That carpet-dusting, though a pretty trade,
Is not the imperative labour after all.

Posted in Poetry, Quotes, Storytelling and tagged , , , | Leave a Comment
30 Apr 2009

Draft of a Reparations Agreement

Like you, I am hungry for a world that is ordered and in place.  In this poem, written in the sickening shadow of the Jewish Holocaust, Dan Pagis reworks the biblical text of Ezekiel 37:1-14 and its vision of restoration, and drafts his own version of a reparations agreement.

All right, gentlemen who cry blue murder as always,
nagging miracle-makers,
quiet!
Everything will be returned to its place,
paragraph after paragraph.
The scream back into the throat.
The gold teeth back to the gums.
The terror.
The smoke back to the tin chimney and further on and inside
back to the hollow of the bones,
and already you will be covered with skin and sinews and you will live,
look, you will have your lives back,
sit in the living room, read the evening paper.
Here you are.  Nothing is too late.
As to the yellow star: immediately it will be torn from your chest
and will emigrate
to the sky.

- Dan Pagis (1930 – 1986)

Posted in Biblical Midrash, Poetry and tagged , , | Leave a Comment
24 Apr 2009

Whatif

Last night, while I lay thinking here,
Some whatifs crawled inside my ear
And pranced and partied all night long
And sang their same old whatif song:
Whatif I’m dumb in school?
Whatif they’ve closed the swimming pool?
Whatif I get beat up?
Whatif there’s poison in my cup?
Whatif I start to cry?
Whatif I get sick and die?
Whatif I flunk that test?
Whatif green hair grows on my chest?
Whatif nobody likes me?
Whatif a bolt of lightning strikes me?
Whatif I don’t grow talle?
Whatif my head starts getting smaller?
Whatif the fish won’t bite?
Whatif the wind tears up my kite?
Whatif they start a war?
Whatif my parents get divorced?
Whatif the bus is late?
Whatif my teeth don’t grow in straight?
Whatif I tear my pants?
Whatif I never learn to dance?
Everything seems swell, and then
The nighttime whatifs strike again!

Shel Silverstein

shel_silverstein

Posted in Poetry and tagged , | Leave a Comment
07 Apr 2009

Magellan by Mary Oliver

Like Magellan, let us find our islands
To die in, far from home, from anywhere
Familiar. Let us risk the wildest places,
Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.

For years we have labored over common roads,
Dreaming of ships that sail into the night.
Let us be heroes, or, if that’s not in us,
Let us find men to follow, honor-bright.

For what is life but reaching for an answer?
And what is death but a refusal to grow?
Magellan had a dream he had to follow.
The sea was big, his ships were awkward, slow.

 And when the fever would not set him free,
To his thin crew, “Sail on, sail on!” he cried.
And so they did, carried the frail dream homeward.
And thus Magellan lives, although he died.

Posted in Curiosity's Trail, Poetry
18 Dec 2005

Mary’s Song by Luci Shaw

Blue homespun and the bend of my breast
keep warm this small hot naked star
fallen to my arms. (Rest
you who have had so far to come.)
Now nearness satisfies
the body of God sweetly. Quiet he lies
whose vigor hurled a universe. He sleeps
whose eyelids have not closed before.
His breath (so slight it seems
no breath at all) once ruffled the dark deeps
to sprout a world. Charmed by doves’ voices,
the whisper of straw, he dreams,
hearing no music from his other spheres.
Breath, mouth, ears, eyes
he is curtailed who overflowed all skies,
all years. Older than eternity, now he
is new. Now native to earth as I am, nailed
to my poor planet, caught
that I might be free, blind in my womb
to know my darkness ended,
brought to this birth for me to be new-born,
and for him to see me mended
I must see him torn.
Luci Shaw

Posted in Poetry
30 Jul 2005

The End of All Our Exploring



This is a picture of the Pacific Ocean near the mouth of the Columbia River. The Corps of Discovery, led by Lewis and Clark, came upon this landscape two hundred years ago. Last week, while walking through the brush, along the bluff’s edge, I thought of these lines from T.S. Eliot:

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

Posted in Curiosity's Trail, Poetry, Tales from the Road
21 Jul 2005

When the Sun Goes Down



When the sun goes down
lowering her head into the coming night
you might think that all is lost.
Beachgoers will pack up the magic
and move on.
Lovers, halting their embrace,
will put the popped cork back into the bottle.
Playful children will gather up their toys
and leave the royal castle to the rising tide.
The black lab will stop splashing in the sea
as the lark completes her serenade.

When this cherished scene
gives way to the darkness,
when what is seen gives ways to the unseen,
the known to the unknown
you might think that grace is no longer about you.

I have found my salvation
right where I am
waiting out the darkness
looking east
to the dawn of a new day.

- TLT, Spanish Banks, Vancouver, Canada

Posted in Poetry, Tales from the Road

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