Tag: John Updike

Water Whispers

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photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

… And still the syllables of water whisper:
The wheel of cloud whirs slowly: while we wait
In the dark room; and in your heart I find
One silver raindrop,—on a hawthorn leaf,—
Orion in a cobweb, and the World.
~Conrad Aiken from “Beloved, Let Us Once More Praise the Rain”

I lay silent under the comforter listening, listening to the constancy of rain.  No let up, no diminishing, just all night long whispering in the dark — water falling from on high.

John Updike says: “Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.”

So I feel blessed by communion with this rainy grace, lots and lots and lots of descending grace, a zillion silver drops falling together to bathe my parched and thirsty world, keep it cleansed and refreshed.

I look for –and find — the world in a raindrop.

photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

No Time to Bloom

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photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

I see buds so subtle
they know, though fat, that this is no time to bloom.
~John Updike from “December, Outdoors”

Our local grocery store garden center does not do a brisk business selling buds. There is no market for the subtlety of potential.

Overnight unsold poinsettias and fresh evergreen wreaths were hauled away with the oddly shaped and drying Christmas trees to make way for containers of unbearably cheerful primroses and early forced narcissus and hyacinth plants.  Now just a week into winter, spring is right in our faces as we wheel past with the grocery cart, a seductive lure to effectively skip a whole season of restorative quiet.  Color and fragrance and lush blooms are handed to us without taking a breather and simply waiting a couple months for them.

Dormant plants and hibernating animals have the right idea this time of year.   Rather than slogging daily through the daily burden of mud, skittering precariously across icy pavement or reaching up out of snow drifts, they are staying busy taking a break.  Well fed and pregnant with potential, they remain alive and well beneath a facade of sleep.  Come out too early and risk frostbite.

It’s no time to bloom right now — being a bud is exactly what is needed, no out of season blossoms need apply.
We can stay busy swelling with potential and dreaming dreams of the glorious growth to come.

photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

Leafy Ghosts

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photo by Josh Scholten

The stripped and shapely
Maple grieves
The ghosts of her
Departed leaves…

And yet the world,
In its distress,
Displays a certain
Loveliness.
~John Updike

The maple’s leaves have let go
in the winds and rain
in a bid for freedom,
swirling to new adventure
and ending in
soft landing
one atop another.

There they lay
in leafy graveyard
among others
seeking release
from branching bondage,
each shaped differently
in designed diversity.

The collected pile slowly
assimilates in color and wilt.
Once distinctive foliage,
so green and grand,
from oak, chestnut,
walnut,  birch
and maple settle in
together at last.

In death
mirroring each other
just as birthing leaf buds
appeared indistinguishable
a mere eight months ago.

My eye now only sees
a mosaic carpet of jumbled
ghostly remnants,
dressing the ground
as they once adorned branches.
No longer do they
lift and dance in the breeze,
no more chemical exchange
of sunlight for fuel.

Distressed and done,
fallen and sodden,
each one lies
alone
together,
a chlorophyll coda
of lost loveliness.

Apple Peel Breezes

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photo by Josh Scholten

“The breezes taste
Of apple peel.
The air is full
Of smells to feel-
Ripe fruit, old footballs,
Burning brush,
New books, erasers,
Chalk, and such.
The bee, his hive,
Well-honeyed hum,
And Mother cuts
Chrysanthemums.
Like plates washed clean
With suds, the days
Are polished with
A morning haze.”
~John Updike in “September”

Lenten Meditation: It Was As His Flesh: Ours

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'The Incredulity of St.Thomas' by Caravaggio ca.1601, at the Neues Palais, Potsdam

Seven Stanzas for Easter by John Updike

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, “Seven Stanzas At Easter,” 1964

Empty Tomb by Barbara Adams