The wind breathes where it wishes
blows where it flows
The eye of your storm
sees from the wild height
Your air augments the world
tearing away dead wood
testing, toughening all trees
spreading all seeds
sifting the sand
carving the rock
the water
in the end
moving the mountain.
You, whose birth broke all
the social and biological rules–
son of the poor who accepted
the worship due a king–
child prodigy debating
with the Temple Th. D.s–you
were the kind who used a new math
to multiply bread, fish, faith.
You practiced a radical sociology:
rehabilitated con men &
call girls. You valued women,
aliens, & other minority groups.
A general practitioner,
you specialized in heart surgery.
Creator, healer, innovator,
shepherd, story-spinner,
weather-maker, botanist,
alchemist, exorcist, iconoclast,
seeker, seer, motive-sifter,
you were always beyond us,
ahead of your own time, & ours.
And we would like to be like you. Bold as the James and John,
the Boanerges brothers,
we hear ourselves demand,
“Admit us to your avant-garde.
Grant us degrees in all
the liberal arts of heaven.”
Why our belligerence? Why
does this whiff of fame and greatness
smell so sweet?
Why do we always compete
to be first? Have we forgotten
how you took, gently & simply,
cool water, & a towel for our feet?
It’s Sunday and time for me to share a poem. I love this poem by Luci Shaw. I think it’s one of the first I ever read of hers and always comes back to mind this time of year. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. I think it’s one that benefits greatly from being read aloud. (There are shades of Hopkins in this poem.)
May 20: Very Early Morning
All the field praises him/all
dandelions are his glory/gold
and silver all trilliums unfold
white flames above their trinities
of leaves all wild strawberries
and massed wood violets reflect his skies–
clean blue and white
all brambles/all oxeyes
all stalks and stems lift to this light
all young windflower bells
tremble on hair
springs for his air’s
carillon touch/last year’s yarrow (raising
brittle star skeletons) tells
age is not past praising
all small low unknown
unnamed weeds show his impossible greens
all grasses sing
tone on clear tone
all mosses spread a spring–
soft velvet for his feet
and by all means
all leaves/buds/all flowers cup
jewels of fire and ice
holding up
to his kind morning heat
a silver sacrifice
now
make of our hearts a field
to raise your praise
It’s still the time, the season, of remembering Christ’s appearances to those He loved. Let us not move too quickly back into ordinary time. (Is there ever an “ordinary” time with Christ in our lives?) Luci Shaw captures this need to learn to recognized Him in this Sunday-poem. We, too, need to “get beyond the way he looks” in our everyday lives:
He who has seen Me has seen the Father (James Tissot)
“. . . for they shall see God”
Matthew 5.8
Christ risen was rarely
recognized by sight.
They had to get beyond the way he looked.
Evidence strong than his voice and face and footstep
waited to grow in them, to guide
their groping from despair,
their stretching beyond belief.
We are as blind as they
until the opening of our deeper eyes
shows us the hands that bless
and break our bread,
until we finger
wounds that tell our healing,
or witness a miracle of fish
dawn-caught after our long night
of empty nets. Handling
his Word, we feel his flesh,
his bones, and hear his voice
calling our early-morning name.
Doubt padlocked one door and
Memory put her back to the other.
Still the damp draught seeped in, though
Fear chinked all the cracks and
Blindness boarded up the window.
In the darkness that was left
Defeat crouched, shivering,
In his cold corner.
Then Jesus came
(all the doors being shut)
and stood among them.
There are so many artistic depictions of the Annunciation, but one of my all-time favorites is one that a good friend of mine gave me a few years ago. You can see it below. Not too long afterward I came across a poem by Luci Shaw that seemed to have been written for it. I share that with you as well. Thank you, Mary, for your earth-changing yes. . .
Virgin
As if until that moment
nothing real
had happened since Creation
As if outside the world were empty
so that she and he were all
there was–he mover, she moved upon
As if her submission were the most
dynamic of all works; as if
no one had ever said Yes like that
As if that day the sun had no place
in all the universe to pour its gold
but her small room
Bare-soled he waits,
bowed bare-headed, stripped to the heart,
eyes narrowing, hands to his face
against the heat,
watching.
Hissing, the dust-dry leaves
and cobwebs shrivel
baring the curved thorns
woven with gold,
and the black-elbowed branches
wrapped in a web of flame.
Wondering, he waits
in the hot shadow of the smoking voice–
observes no quivering flake of ash
blown down-draft from the holy blaze,
no embers glowing on the ground.
Flinching, himself, before the blast
he sees the unshrinking thorny stems
alive, seared but still strong,
uncharred, piercing the fire.
Enveloped now in burning, ardent speech
he feels the hot sparks touching his
tinder soul, to turn him into flame.
There are some things that should be as they are:
plain, unadorned, common, and all-complete;
things not in a clutter, not in a clump,
unmuddled and unmeddled with;
the straight, the smooth, the salt, the sour, the sweet.
For all that’s timeless, untutored, untailored, and untooled;
for innocence unschooled,
for unplowed prairies, primal snow and sod,
water unmuddied, wind unruled,
for these, thank God . . .
This Sunday’s poem is one by Luci Shaw. There is always risk in wrestling with God.
With Jacob
Inexorably I cry
as I wrestle
for the blessing,
thirsty, straining
for the joining
till my desert throat
runs dry.
I must risk
the shrunken sinew
and the laming of
his naming
till I find
my final quenching
in the hollow
of his thigh.
The wind breathes where it wishes
now
Virgin
Moses Reclothed
A Song for Simplicity
Witnesses to Hope 