Poems calling

Gilbert K. Chesterton wrote a book in 1908, titled Orthodoxy, and it has been re-discovered in recent years by a wide-range of authors from Garry Wills to Brian McLaren, which is another way of my saying that Chesterton seems to be popping up all over the place these days. Before you are put off by the title, Chesterton has many surprises, among them that the best theologians may be poets: "The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logian who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits."

So, dear readers, here is a poem to start your week, another gift of my poet friend, Karen, in Tennessee:

Things to Think

by Robert Bly

 

Think in ways you've never thought before.

If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message

Larger than anything you've ever heard,

Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

 

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,

Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose

Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers

A child of your own whom you've never seen.

 

When someone knocks on the door,

Think that he's about

To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,

Or that it's not necessary to work all the time,

Or that it's been decided that if you lie down no one will die.