The air was soft, the ground still cold.
In the dull pasture where I strolled
Was something I could not believe.
Dead grass appeared to slide and heave,
Though still too frozen-flat to stir,
And rocks to twitch and all to blur.
What was this rippling of the land?
Was matter getting out of hand
And making free with natural law,
I stopped and blinked, and then I saw
A fact as eerie as a dream.
There was a subtle flood of steam
Moving upon the face of things.
It came from standing pools and springs
And what of snow was still around;
It came of winter’s giving ground
So that the freeze was coming out,
As when a set mind, blessed by doubt,
Relaxes into mother-wit.
Flowers, I said, will come of it.
~Richard Wilbur “April 5, 1974”
As the ground softens, so do I.
Somehow winter freeze was comforting
as nothing appeared to change,
so neither did I,
staying stolid and fixed.
But now the fixed is flexing,
steaming in its labor,
and so must I,
giving ground
and birth
to blooms.
These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time.
~Richard Wilbur from “Year’s End”
Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention. They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go next.
~Frederick Buechner
I’m not paying close enough attention if I’m too busy looking for kleenex. It seems the last couple weeks I have had more than ample opportunity to find out the secret of who I am, where I have come from and where I am to be next, and I’m loading my pockets with kleenex, just in case.
It mostly has to do with welcoming our children, their spouses and their friends back home for the holidays to become a full out noisy messy chaotic household again, with lots of music and laughter and laundry and meal preparation. It is about singing grace together before a meal and choking on precious words of gratitude. It certainly has to do with bidding farewell again, as we begin to do a few hours from now and, to gather them in for the hug and then unclasping and letting go, urging and encouraging them to go where their hearts are telling them they are needed and called to be. I too was let go once and though I would try to look back, too often in tears, I knew to set my face toward the future. It led me here, to this farm, this marriage, this family, this work, to more tears, to more letting go, as it will continue if I live long enough to weep again and again with gusto and grace.
This is where I should go next: to love so much and so deeply that letting go is so hard that tears are no longer unexpected or a mystery to me. They release the fullness that can no longer be contained: God’s still small voice spilling down my cheeks drop by drop like wax from a burning candle. No kleenex needed. Let it flow.
This upstart thistle
Is young and touchy; it is
All barb and bristle,
Threatening to wield
Its green, jagged armament
Against the whole field.
Butterflies will dare
Nonetheless to lay their eggs
In that angle where
The leaf meets the stem,
So that ants or browsing cows
Cannot trouble them.
Summer will grow old
As will the thistle, letting
A clenched bloom unfold
To which the small hum
Of bee wings and the flash of
Goldfinch wings will come,
Till its purple crown
Blanches, and the breezes strew
The whole field with down.
~Richard Wilbur “A Pasture Poem”
Piecemeal the summer dies;
At the field’s edge a daisy lives alone;
A last shawl of burning lies
On a gray field-stone.
~Richard Wilbur from “Exeunt”
Except to prompt a fit of elegy
It is for us no more, or if it is,
It is a sort of music for the eye,
A rugged ground bass like the bagpipe’s drone
On which the leaf-light like a chanter plays.
~Richard Wilbur from “A Wall in the Woods”
Caught Summer is always an imagined time.
Time gave it, yes, but time out of any mind.
There must be prime
In the heart to beget that season, to reach past rain
and find
Riding the palest days
Its perfect blaze.
~Richard Wilbur from “My Father Paints the Summer”
1. A MILKWEED
Yet he shall be forsaken,
And yielded up to die;
The sky shall groan and darken,
And every stone shall cry.
And every stone shall cry
For stony hearts of men:
God’s blood upon the spearhead,
God’s love refused again.
But now, as at the ending,
The low is lifted high;
The stars shall bend their voices,
And every stone shall cry.
And every stone shall cry,
In praises of the child,
By whose descent among us,
The worlds are reconciled.
~Richard Wilbur from “A Christmas Hymn”
Reading the news from around the world, I could be convinced we’re all mute and dull as rocks, inconsequential and immobile, trod upon and paved over, forgettable and forgotten. I could believe there exists no pulse in our stony hearts. I could believe we are incapable of love as we turn away from a God descending to lie with us on the ground where we lay.
Yet even the low are lifted high by His descent– every stone, yes even the dumb and lifeless, shall cry out in community with Him, even the silent will find a voice to praise. Even my own voice, meager and anemic, shall be heard.
No longer forgotten. In fact, we never were.
So hard to reconcile but if the stones have known it all along, so should we.
Barnstorming 