Category: Poetry

The Intricate Texture of Things

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Here is a new light on the intricate texture of things in the world…: the way we the living are nibbled and nibbling — not held aloft on a cloud in the air but bumbling pitted and scarred and broken through a frayed and beautiful land.
~Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

fogdrops3

The weather is getting brisker so the outdoor critters, some invited, some not,  are starting to move inside.  The cats scoot between our legs as we open the front door, heading straight for the fireplace to bask in the warmth rather than a cold wind. The pup comes in from the yard for a nightly snack and chew bone, and stretches out on the rug, acting every bit like a piece of furry furniture. And today there was another mouse in the trap under the sink. I almost thought we were mouse-free with three weeks of none sighted and none trapped, but there he was waiting for me in the morning, well fed and quite dead.  He became an opportune meal for a cat too lazy to go get himself a living breathing mouse.

From nibbling to nibbled.  It is a tough world, inside and out.

Our most numerous and ambitious visitors from outside are the spiders, appearing miraculously crawling futilely up the sides in the bathtub, or scurrying across the kitchen floor, or webbing themselves into a corner of the ceiling with little hope of catching anything but a stray house moth or two this time of year. Arachnids are certainly determined yet stationary predators, rebuilding their sticky traps as needed to ensure their victims won’t rip away, thereby destroying the web.

I don’t really mind sharing living quarters with another of God’s creatures, but I do prefer the ones that are officially invited into our space and not surprise guests. The rest are interlopers that I tolerate with grudging admiration for their instinctive ingenuity. I admit I’m much too large, inept, and bumbling to find my way into someone else’s abode through a barely perceptible crack, and I’m certainly incapable of weaving the intricate beauty of a symmetrical web placed just so in a high corner.

After all, I am just another creature in the same boat. There is something quite humbling about being actually invited into this frayed and beautiful, complex and broken world, “pitted and scarred” as I am. I’m grateful I’ve so far escaped capture in the various insidious traps of life,  not just the spring-loaded kind and the sticky filament kind.

So it is okay that I’m settled in, cozy in front of the fireplace, just a piece of the furniture. Just so long as I don’t startle anyone or nibble too much of what I shouldn’t, I just might be invited to stay awhile.

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Come and See: Bearing Witness to the Light

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There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light.

The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh
nor of the will of man, but of God.
John 1:6-13

God, Who made the sun, also made the moon.
The moon does not take away from the brilliance of the sun.
The moon would be only a burnt-out cinder floating in the immensity of space were it not for the sun. All its light is reflected from the sun. On dark nights we are grateful for the moon; when we see it shining, we know there must be a sun. So in this dark night of the world when men turn their backs on Him Who is the Light of the World, we … await the sunrise.
~Archbishop Fulton Sheen from The World’s First Love

John the Baptist was clear: he was a witness to the True Light Jesus, not the light himself.

He reflected the origin of light, like the moon reflects the sun.

We are naturally wary of prophets, not knowing who to believe and who leads us astray. God warns us about false prophets, yet we have difficulty discerning truth, so turn our backs to it, missing the Light.

Instead, when I see moonlight, I try to remember the message of John the Baptist: seeing the moon glow reminds me the Sun is the true origin of Light. And so as God’s children, we are to reflect the Light as well, bearing witness in the darkness.

I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year. At the beginning of each week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.

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Blooming into Glass

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All the love you will ever feel
you have always carried within you

The pellet you think love is

blooms into stone,
into flame, into glass

The tree knows
how to feed every part of itself

When you tap the tree
to drink it
it speaks to you

There is sweetness in you
All the self can do
is melt
~Hannah Stephenson from “Sap Season”

It never mattered that there was once a vast grieving:

trees on their hillsides, in their groves, weeping—
a plastic gold dropping

through seasons and centuries to the ground—
until now.

The clear air we need to find each other in is
gone forever, yet

this resin once
collected seeds, leaves and even small feathers as it fell
and fell

which now in a sunny atmosphere seem as alive as
they ever were

as though the past could be present and memory itself
a Baltic honey—

a chafing at the edges of the seen, a showing off of just how much
can be kept safe

inside a flawed translucence.
~Eavan Boland, from “Amber” in The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women’s Poetry (2011)

The last remaining cherry tree on our farm,
a Royal Anne,
has stood between house and barn for over 100 years.
This year, its branch joints and bark defects are bleeding – oozing sculptures of amber sap.

The resin is hard and glass-like,
reflecting the tree’s slow internal circulation,
changing subtly day by day.

Though its cherries burst months ago
with juicy flavor,
now it bleeds crystalline flames from its wounds.

What a gift is this love bleeding out
as it moves deep inside an old trunk.
In its thirsty anguish, our dear cherry tree is weeping,
creating glass fruit reflecting Light.

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A Wordless Song

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Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on—on—and out of sight.

Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away. . . O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless;
the singing will never be done. 
~Siegried Sassoon “Everyone Sang”

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –

And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.
~Emily Dickinson “Hope is the thing with feathers”

When it feels like the world is rent in two,
and the gulf into which we topple
too wide and dark to climb without help,
we can look to the sky
and see the birds’ stitching and hear their wordless singing,
the careful caring line of connection
pulling us out of a hopeless hole,
startled and grateful
to be made whole.
Hope borne on feathered wings:
may we fly threaded and knitted to one another, singing.

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Wet from the Start

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On a rainy day in Seattle stumble into any coffee shop
and look wounded by the rain.

Say Last time I was in I left my black umbrella here.
A waitress in a blue beret will pull a black umbrella

from behind the counter and surrender it to you
like a sword at your knighting.

Unlike New Englanders, she’ll never ask you
to describe it, never ask what day you came in,

she’s intimate with rain and its appointments.
Look positively reunited with this black umbrella

and proceed to Belltown and Pike Place.
Sip cappuccino at the Cowgirl Luncheonette on First Ave.

Visit Buster selling tin salmon silhouettes
undulant in the wind, nosing ever into the oncoming,

meandering watery worlds, like you and the black umbrella,
the one you will lose on purpose at the day’s end

so you can go the way you came
into the world, wet looking.
~Rick Agran “Black Umbrellas” from Crow Milk

rainy day from a Starbucks shop in Edinburgh Scotland
Pike Street Market in Seattle
anywhere today in western Washington

Anyone using an umbrella in the Pacific Northwest must have come from somewhere else where rain drenches. In the northwest, we have at least 5 kinds of gray drizzle, none of which usually requires an umbrella.

This is embarrassing, but in my archive of over 20,000 photos, there is not one umbrella. I don’t even own one, having lived here for over 70 years.

We’re all about hooded jackets or going bare-headed if necessary.

Don’t ask me why, but it is a stubborn cultural “I’m a native” thing and umbrellas seem like too much of a bother, a sign of weakness.

I appreciated my visits to Japan which can have torrential but brief rainstorms, and almost every shop had a bucket of umbrellas at the door that you could “borrow” and then drop off at your next stop. No keeping track. Very civilized.

But not here.

I think Washingtonians just like to be rebaptized, over and over…
Maybe that’s why.

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A Bleak and Bitter Remembrance

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When you go home tell them of us and say –
“For your tomorrow we gave our today”
~John Maxwell Edmonds from “The Kohima Epitaph” 

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
~Lawrence Binyon from “For the Fallen” (1914)

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
~LtCol (Dr.) John McCrae from “In Flanders Fields”

We who are left, how shall we look again
Happily on the sun, or feel the rain,
Without remembering how they who went
Ungrudgingly, and spent
Their all for us, loved, too, the sun and rain?

A bird upon the rain-wet lilac sings —
But we, how shall we turn to little things
And listen to the birds and winds and streams
Made holy by their dreams,
Nor feel the heartbreak in the heart of things?
~Wilfred Wilson Gibson “A Lament”

November pierces with its bleak remembrance
Of all the bitterness and waste of war.
Our silence tries but fails to make a semblance
Of that lost peace they thought worth fighting for.
Our silence seethes instead with wraiths and whispers,
And all the restless rumour of new wars,
The shells are falling all around our vespers,
No moment is unscarred, there is no pause,
In every instant bloodied innocence
Falls to the weary earth ,and whilst we stand
Quiescence ends again in acquiescence,
And Abel’s blood still cries in every land
One silence only might redeem that blood
Only the silence of a dying God.
~Malcolm Guite “Silence: a Sonnet for Remembrance Day”

To our military veterans here and abroad –
in deep appreciation and gratitude–
for the freedoms you have defended on behalf of us all:

No one is left untouched and unscarred in the bitterness of war.

My father was one of the fortunate ones who came home, returning to a quiet farm life after three years serving in the Pacific with the Marines Corp from 1942 to 1945.  Hundreds of thousands of his colleagues didn’t come home, dying on beaches and battlefields.  Tens of thousands more came home forever marked, through physical or psychological injury, by the experience of war and witness of death and mayhem all around them.

No matter how one views wars our nation has fought and may be obligated to fight in the future, we must support and care for the men and women who have made, on our behalf, the commitment and sacrifice to be on the front line for freedom’s sake.

Even our God died so we could stop fighting each other (and Him). What a waste we have not stopped to listen and understand His sacrifice enough to finally lay down our weapons against one another forever.

AI image created for this post

Support for wounded veterans:

Disabled American Veterans

Disabled Veterans National Foundation

Wounded Warrior Project

To Be Remembered…

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My grandfather stands on the front porch
watching the dogs come back, reassembled

from hair and grit and eyeteeth. Now
the twin mares browse by the fence

in their coats of dust. Nobody asks
what they mean, appearing so suddenly

when nobody needed them, or called.
In the back yard, the buried people —

great-grandmothers in spectator pumps,
the great-grandfather who died of sneezing,

the first baby, never named —
stay buried. It’s not their overshoes

lost in the grass behind the smokehouse,
not their faces alive in anyone’s

memory. But my mother waits
in the pecan tree’s fingered shadow,

holding a broken milk jug full
of daylilies, waiting as if

she wanted someone to tell her again
it’s all right to be born now,

now is as good a time as any.
In a month we’ll find my grandfather’s glasses

in their case under the front seat
of his car. “Oh goodness,” my aunt will say,

as if it were a matter of his
forgetting them. As if we could

give them back. We’re all convinced
we’ve missed the moment. We forget

that pause while a soul undoes
its buttons, the world falls away,

and one by one we step out
into this death, to be remembered.
~Sally Thomas “Reunion”

The sunlight now lay over the valley perfectly still.
I went over to the graveyard beside the church and found them under the old cedars…
I am finding it a little hard to say that I felt them resting there,
but I did…
I saw that, for me, this country would always be populated with presences and absences,
presences of absences,
the living and the dead.
The world as it is would always be a reminder of the world that was, and of the world that is to come.
Wendell Berry in Jayber Crow

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
~Mary Oliver from “When Death Comes”

God is at home.
It is we who have gone out for a walk.
~Meister Eckhart

And He awaits for our return.
He keeps the light on,
so we can find our way back,
when we are weary, or fearful or hungry
or simply longing for reunion,
to be remembered.

I think of those who wait for me on the other side,
including our baby lost before birth over 42 years ago.

I know God watches over all these reunions;
He knows the moment when our fractured hearts
heal whole once again.

I will see you soon enough, sweet ones. Soon enough.

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Come and See: The Light Shines in the Darkness

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He was with God in the beginning.
 Through him all things were made;
without him nothing was made that has been made. 
 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 
The light shines in the darkness, 
and the darkness has not overcome it.
John 1:2-5

Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening
into the house and gate of heav’n:
to enter into that gate and dwell in that house,
where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling,
but one equal light;
no noise nor silence,
but one equal music;
no fears nor hopes,
but one equal possession;
no ends nor beginnings,
but one equal eternity;
in the habitation of thy glory and dominion,
world without end.
Amen.
~John Donne – a prayer

For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
2 Corinthians 4:6

It seems impossible that God could be contained within the darkness of a womb.

The Creator, who made the heavens, went deep into His vast inner universe of atoms and sub-atomic particles. He hosted tiny cellular nuclei within His body, instead of the heaven-flung massive nebulae in distant galaxies.

And He chose to do this. Out of His love and goodness, He became Light in the darkest space of the human body, to be birthed to illuminate a world bent on destruction.

From radiance to ribosomes,
from cosmos to cytoplasm,
from galaxies to Golgi apparatus,
from moons to mitochondria,
from utter darkness to “let there be light.”

And there is Light.
God is there, coming from above and coming from within.

I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.

Lyrics:
Through love to light!
Oh, wonderful the way
That leads from darkness to the perfect day!
From darkness and from sorrow of the night
To morning that comes singing o’er the sea.
Through love to light!
Through light, O God, to thee,
Who art the love of love, the eternal light of light!

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The Shadow of Joy

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Today as the news from Selma and Saigon 
poisons the air like fallout, 
I come again to see 
the serene great picture that I love. 

Here space and time exist in light  the eye like the eye of faith believes. 
The seen, the known 
dissolve in iridescence, become 
illusive flesh of light 
that was not, was, forever is. 

O light beheld as through refracting tears. 
Here is the aura of that world 
each of us has lost. 
Here is the shadow of its joy. 
~Robert Hayden “Monet’s Waterlilies”

…The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases.  Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
~Lisel Mueller, “Monet Refuses the Operation” from Second Language

Monet’s Waterlilies, Art Institute of Chicago

“Heaven pulls earth into its arms…”

We see things differently, don’t we?
What seems ordinary to one person is extraordinary to another.

How might I learn to adjust my focus to see things as you do?
How might I help others to see the world as I do?

The world is flux; my delight and dismay flows from moment to moment, from object to absence, from light to darkness, from color to gray. Perhaps the blur from the figurative (or real) cataract impeding my vision creates a deeper understanding, as I use my imagination to fill in what I can’t discern.

My heart and mind expands to claim this world and all that beauty has to offer, while heaven – all this while – is pulling me into its arms.

In heaven, my focus will be clear. It will all be extraordinarily holy.

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A Little Tired and Hungry

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For grace to be grace,
it must give us things we didn’t know we needed
and take us places where
we didn’t know we didn’t want to go.
~Kathleen Norris from Cloister Walk

Sap withdraws from the upper reaches
of maples; the squirrel digs deeper
and deeper in the moss
to bury the acorns that fall
all around, distracting him.

I’m out here in the dusk…
where the wild asters, last blossoms
of the season, straggle uphill.
Frost flowers, I’ve heard them called.
The white ones have yellow centers
at first: later they darken
to a rosy copper.  They’re mostly done.
Then the blue ones come on. It’s blue
all around me now, though the color
has gone with the sun.

There is no one home but me—
and I’m not at home; I’m up here on the hill,
looking at the dark windows below.
Let them be dark…

…The air is damp and cold
and by now I am a little hungry…
The squirrel is high in the oak,
gone to his nest , and night has silenced
the last loud rupture of the calm.
~Jane Kenyon from “Frost Flowers”

Even when the load grows too heavy,
when misery rolls in like a fog that
covers all that was once vibrant,

even then
even then

there awaits a nest of nurture,
a place of calm
where the tired and hungry
are fed.

We who are empty will be filled;
we who are weary will be restored.

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