MyQuest | my thoughts on life's journey

Horses at Midnight Without a Moon

I really enjoyed today's poem for the day from the American Academy of Poets:

Horses at Midnight Without a Moon
by Jack Gilbert
Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods. Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt. But there's music in us. Hope is pushed down but the angel flies up again taking us with her. The summer mornings begin inch by inch while we sleep, and walk with us later as long-legged beauty through the dirty streets. It is no surprise that danger and suffering surround us. What astonishes is the singing. We know the horses are there in the dark meadow because we can smell them, can hear them breathing. Our spirit persists like a man struggling through the frozen valley who suddenly smells flowers and realizes the snow is melting out of sight on top of the mountain, knows that spring has begun.

 

"Every Riven Thing"

Hear Christian Wiman read his poem.

A little bit on resurrection for you this morning

On the day after Ash Wednesday, and contemplating our mortality, how about a little bit on resurrection?  Nothing new to followers of this blog or my preaching, but I liked the way Moltmann says it here in these quotes from The Crucified God:

This world of death and the coming world of life are no longer set over against each other like two different periods of the world. . . . In that one man [Jesus the Christ] the future of the new world of life has already gained power over this unredeemed world of death and has condemned it to become a world that passes away.  Therefore, in faith in the risen Jesus, men already live in the midst of the transitory world of death from the powers of the new world of life that have dawned in him.

By the way, I really like that phrase "the powers of the new world of life."

Or, for a different little bit of resurrection, there is this Mary Oliver poem, "Prayer," with which I ended our Ash Wednesday service last night:

May I never not be frisky,
May I never not be risqué.

May my ashes, when you have them, friend,
and give them to the ocean,

leap in the froth of the waves,
still loving movement,

still ready, beyond all else,
to dance for the world

 

 

The Partaker Partakes

It Must Change, IV by Wallace Stevens

Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day and night, the imagined

On the real  This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.

Music falls on the silence like a sense,
A passion that we feel, not understand.
Morning and afternoon are clapsed together

And North and south are an intrinsic couple
And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers
That walk away as one in the greenest body.

In solitude the trumpets of solitude
Are not of another solitude resounding;
A little string speaks for a crowd of voices.

The partaker partakes of that which changes him.
The child that touches takes character from the thing,
The body, it touches.  The captain and his men

Are one and the sailor and the sea are one.
Follow after, O my companion, my fellow, my self,
Sister and solace, brother and delight. 

Poetry will make you a better leader

Michael Jinkins, president and professor of theology at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, writes about poet William Dunbar and concludes:

Today, in this age of instant access to ideas that are seldom worth even the small trouble, I want to encourage you to seek out a poet, a good poet, who will require a little work. Slap on a pair of water skis, and have a go. It will make you a better leader.

Ring in the New Year

In Memoriam, [Ring out, wild bells]
by Lord Alfred Tennyson

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
   The flying cloud, the frosty light:
   The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
   Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
   The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
   For those that here we see no more;
   Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
   And ancient forms of party strife;
   Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
   The faithless coldness of the times;
   Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
   The civic slander and the spite;
   Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
   Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
   Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
   The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
   Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

 

Two Wallace Stevens Excerpts

Two excerpts from the poem "Esthetique du Mal" by Wallace Stevens:

The death of Satan was a tragedy
For the imagination.  A capital
Negation destroyed him in his tenement
And, with him, many blue phenomena.
It was not the end he had foreseen.  He knew
That his revenge created filial
Revenges.  And negation was eccentric.
It had nothing of the Julian thunder-cloud:
The assassin flash and rumble . . .  He was denied.
Phantoms, what have you left?  What underground?
What place in which to be is not enough
To be?  You go, poor phantoms, without place
Like silver in the sheathing of the sight,
As the eye closes . . .  How cold the vacancy
When the phantoms are gone and the shaken realist
First sees reality.  The mortal no
Has its emptiness and tragic expirations.
The tragedy, however, may have begun, 
Again, in the imagination's new beginnin,
In the yess of the realist spoken because he must
Say yes, spoken because under every no
Lay a passion for yes that had never been broken.

***

Life is a bitter aspic.  We are not
At the centre of a diamond. 

Feed Me Also

Feed Me, Also, River God

by Marianne Moore

Lest by diminished vitality and abated    vigilance, I become food for crocodiles—for that quicksand    of gluttony which is legion. It is there close at hand—       on either side       of me. You remember the Israelites who said in pride and stoutness of heart: "The bricks are fallen down, we will    build with hewn stone, the sycamores are cut down, we will    change to cedars"? I am not ambitious to dress stones, to       renew forts, nor to match       my value in action, against their ability to catch up with arrested prosperity. I am not like    them, indefatigable, but if you are a god, you will    not discriminate against me. Yet—if you may fulfill       none but prayers dressed       as gifts in return for your gifts—disregard the request.

 

Playing with Fire

playing with fire by Evie Shockley something is always burning, passion,                         pride, envy, desire, the internal organs         going chokingly up in smoke, as some-                 thing outside the body exerts a pull that drags us like a match across sand-                         paper. something is always burning,         london, paris, detroit, l.a., the neighbor-                 hoods no one outside seems to see until they're backlit by flames, when the out-                         siders, peering through dense, acrid,         black-&-orange-rimmed fumes, mis-                 take their dark reflections for savages altogether alien. how hot are the london                         riots for west end pearls? how hot in tot-         tenham? if one bead of cream rolls down         one precious neck, heads will roll in brix- ton: the science of sociology. the mark                         duggan principle of cause and effect:         under conditions of sufficient pressure—                 measured roughly in years + lead ÷ £s— black blood is highly combustible.

Language, Land, & the Eucharist

A good essay on why our language matters, particularly in relation to the land, agriculture, and ecology.  It is also an essay about my favourite poet, Wendell Berry, and about the Eucharist.  Enjoy.

After graduating from college, I lived and worked in Central America and devoted many years to acquiring the agricultural tools I thought would be helpful in working with others to grow food. But the more agricultural and ecological science I learned, the more I was filled with an unmistakable sense of the dissonance between the language and practice of those sciences and the theological convictions that had led me to the work and study of agriculture in the first place. At stake was a problem that certainly involved issues of correct application of agricultural tools to particular people, places, and needs. But the problem concerned more than issues of application; it had to do with fundamental questions like: what is land? What is it for? How to characterize our relationship to it? What does it mean to receive it, like our lives, as gift?