Tag: Luci Shaw

Fingerprints of the Creator

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C.S. Lewis said, “Most of us miss our cues repeatedly.” 
Or, as Sherlock Holmes commented to Watson:
“You see, but you do not observe.” 
Artist Thomas La Duke noted: 
“Some things are so common that they disappear. 
They’re all around us, but they vanish.” 
Missing our cues, we fail to notice the fingerprints of the Creator
in the ordinary textures and phenomena of living
because we are distracted by daily urgencies,
by things we consider more important,
which in the end may prove to be both trivial and transient.
Mary Oliver wrote:  
“If you notice anything
it leads you to notice
more
and more.”
~Luci Shaw from Breath for the Bones

 

How is it I see more at 61 than I ever did at 20, 30, 40, or even 50?
It is like being ten again when everything was a discovery; everything is worth notice.

 

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An Intricate Dusk

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Black birds slice their evening patterns—
long curves in the sky. Everything
is drawing down into shade.
But the dark, which is at first so simple
is not simple. Away from the farmhouse
with its slits of yellow, the monochrome
develops like a print in the chemical bath.

The unbroken velvet swims
with complications so subtle that
seeing and hearing must take their time
to know. The shadow purples,
the dusk intricate with crickets. The sky
infested with pricks of light.
My whole body an ear, an eye.
~Luci Shaw “A Simple Dark”

 

Let it come, as it will, and don’t   
be afraid. God does not leave us   
comfortless, so let evening come.
~Jane Kenyon from “Let Evening Come”

Wandering the evening farm,
I feel the darkness,
more than see or hear
the settling of birdsong,
the rise of coyote calls,
the horizon’s firelight,
the slowing of my pulse,
and the deepening of my breaths.

I let it come, this most intricate dusk.

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Hear Pink Sing

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Not a color I’ve wanted to wear—too
innocently girlish, and I’m not innocent,
not a girl. But today the gnarled cherry trees
along Alabama Street are decked out
like bridesmaids—garlands in their hair,
nosegays in their hands—extravagant…
~Luci Shaw from “Pink”

If you stand in an orchard
In the middle of Spring
and you don’t make a sound
you can hear pink sing,
a darling, whispery song of a thing.
~Mary O’Neill from Hailstones and Halibut Bones “Pink”

Nothing about me is pink
except my windblown cheeks
on a brisk April day,
yet I love listening to pink
as it blooms all around me,
bubbling with ebullience,
whispering me awake in the morning
and bidding me gently goodnight.

 

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Awaiting His Arrival: From Fearful to Unafraid

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“Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God.“
 “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.”
Luke 1:30, 38

 

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 one day the sun had no place
in all the universe to pour its gold
but her small room
~Luci Shaw “Virgin”

 

and she
looked up at him, their looks so merged in one
the world outside grew vacant, suddenly,
and all things being seen, endured and done
were crowded into them: just she and he
eye and its pasture, visions and its view,
here at the point and at this point alone:-
see, this arouses fear. Such fear both knew.
~Rainer Maria Rilke from “Annunciation to Mary”

Awaiting His Arrival: From Emptied to Overflowing

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He has satisfied the hungry hearts and sent the rich away with empty hands.
Luke 1:53

For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord
    as the waters cover the sea.
Habakkuk 2:14

 

 Thou who wast rich beyond all splendour,
All for love’s sake becamest poor;
Thrones for a manger didst surrender,
Sapphire-paved courts for stable floor.
Thou who wast rich beyond all splendour,
All for love’s sake becomes poor.
~Frank Houghton

 

Breath, mouth, ears, eyes
he is curtailed who overflowed all skies,
all years. Older than eternity, now he
is new.
~Luci Shaw from “Mary’s Song”

 

Do you think you could contain Niagara Falls in a teacup?
Don’t come with a thimble when God has nothing less to give you
than the ocean of himself.
~Brennan Manning

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Awaiting His Arrival: From Trouble to Mystery

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The angel went to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”
Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. 30 But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary…”
38 “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May your word to me be fulfilled.” Then the angel left her.
Luke 1: 28-30, 38

 

…to bear in her womb
Infinite weight and lightness; to carry
in hidden, finite inwardness,
nine months of Eternity; to contain
in slender vase of being,
the sum of power –
in narrow flesh,
the sum of light.

Then bring to birth,
push out into air, a Man-child
needing, like any other,
milk and love –

but who was God.
~Denise Levertov from “The Annunciation”

 

This is the honest grace of her body:
that she is afraid, and in this moment does not
hide her fear.
Until in the cave of her body
she might feel without willing it a tenderness
begin to form. Like the small, ghostly
clover of the meadow; the deer hidden
in the hills. A tenderness like mourning.
The source of love, she thinks, is mourning.
…the child that will soon form
inside her body, this loss by which we come
to bend before the given, its arms that open
unexplained, and take us in.
~Laurie Sheck from “The Annunciation”

 

Still, the secret at her heart burns like
a sun rising. How to hold it in—
that which cannot be contained.

But then, part dazzled, part prescient—
she hugs her body, a pod with a seed
that will split her.
~Luci Shaw from “Mary Consider Her Situation”

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The Air Sighs

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When, in the cavern darkness, the child
first opened his mouth (even before
his eyes widened to see the supple world
his lungs had breathed into being),
could he have known that breathing
trumps seeing? Did he love the way air sighs
as it brushes in and out through flesh
to sustain the tiny heart’s iambic beating,
tramping the crossroads of the brain
like donkey tracks, the blood dazzling and
invisible, the corpuscles skittering to the earlobes
and toenails? Did he have any idea it
would take all his breath to speak in stories
that would change the world?
~Luci Shaw “Breath”
Breath that created the world
by forming the Words
that tell the stories
that change the world.
We rest in that breath today,
sighing in Sabbath.

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Picturing the Light

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The most important person in any picture is the light.
~Edward Manet

Not exactly dark, but without shade,
the sharp purity of morning has been
diminished. I read somewhere that
“only full light reveals shadow.”
Moving through fog, living
is a blindness, a yielding
of my layered ignorance to the mist.
~Luci Shaw from “Without a Shadow”

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Awash with Angels

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Today, in Bellingham, even the sidewalks gleam.
Small change glints from the creases
in the lady’s mantle and the hostas after
the rain that falls, like grace, unmerited.
My pockets are full, spilling over.
~Luci Shaw from “Small Change”

There were thunder storms and torrential rains to the north of us, to the east and to the south, but we had only a gentle constant showering during the night — a calm center.  This morning such undeserved grace is gleaming as if a spill over of twilight’s gloaming.

Today we are awash, cleansed,  with bright wings.

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And for all this, nature is never spent;
    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
~ Gerard Manly Hopkins from “God’s Grandeur”


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Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
~Richard Wilbur

Waiting…

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photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten

I’m waiting, like any fern in a garden,
to be rained on, or sun-drenched.

Oh, I am little, little.

What is blessing but a largeness
so immense it crowds out
everything but itself?
~Luci Shaw from “On Retreat”

We are in Ireland now, amid drizzle and bluster. It is so familiar; it is home with a brogue. Soon we’ll head to stay 5 days in an old stone barn that belonged to Dan’s great great great grandparents. I can’t imagine our own barn would be still standing in 150 years, much less habitable.

We, so little, so very little, drenched with the history, waiting for the blessings of finding family soil.

photo by Josh Scholten
photo by Josh Scholten