A poem to get us through

I haven't run a poem on Fiat Lux in awhile. Margaret Haupt, one of our Stephen Ministry leaders, sent this, and so I pass it along...

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Kindness
By Naormi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho 
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans 
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, 
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.  
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth. 

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and 
     purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you every where
like a shadow or a friend.

When joy and sorrow inspire

On Friday, we had the last of our Lenten luncheons for the season at St. Paul's. We were treated to a talk and poetry reading by Lisa Russ Spaar, a noted poet and professor at the University of Virginia and long-time member of St. Paul's.

She read not just her own poems, but poems that speak to her heart and soul written by others, and ranging through the centuries.

She noted that church is one place where the language of poetry -- the language of the spirit -- never seems out of place. Indeed, she told us the version of the Bible she prefers reading is the King James -- for the poetry, of course.

I have enjoyed her poetry for several years. Her poems are intimate -- she describes herself as a "love poet" though others have noted that she could be thought of as a religious poet. That I think those lables sell her short.

She uses words common to religion, like "Collect" and "devout," and she mines the images of the altar like grapes, and the themes of Advent and Lent, and even has a poem devoted to John Donne's mistress. One of her poems mentions "surplices," a traditional priestly garb. Yet she opens new windows into the meaning old themes, finding both joy and sorrow, love and endings, underneath the words. When I read her poems, I pause at the words and reflect on where she is taking me with them. Like all great poetry, her words need to be taken slowly, and often more than once.

It has been sometime since I've posted a poem here. I used to do that regularly. It is time to get back into that practice. Here is a poem by Lisa from her book, Satin Cash. I used a few stanzas from this poem in our prayer before lunch.

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COLLECT FOR A SEPARATION 

Between silence and yes,
such distal blues. 

I know love is pure
when joy and sorrow inspire 

equal gratitude, and yet
these wind-sussed elms require 

a certain nineteenth-century attention
today - an eavesdropping. 

Even the cool, testicular grapes,
green and cupped in the pergola 

beneath wilted purple shade
and a dizzying crewelwork of vines, 

waver, heatstruck and speechless
in the solitary séance of my heart.

Photos by Lori Korleski Richardson

The wounded we have dismissed, we are one of them

I like to post poems here from time-to-time, and we haven't had many lately. Poetry gives us breathing space because we can't read it quickly; in a way, that makes poetry a prayer, or close to it. Leslie Middleton sent me this one the other day, and I leave with you today. Breath deeply first:

A Short Testament
by Anne Porter

Whatever harm I may have done
In all my life in all your wide creation
If I cannot repair it
I beg you to repair it,

And then there are all the wounded
The poor the deaf the lonely and the old
Whom I have roughly dismissed
As if I were not one of them.
Where I have wronged them by it
And cannot make amends
I ask you
To comfort them to overflowing,

And where there are lives I may have withered around me,
Or lives of strangers far or near
That I've destroyed in blind complicity,
And if I cannot find them
Or have no way to serve them,

Remember them. I beg you to remember them

When winter is over
And all your unimaginable promises
Burst into song on death's bare branches.

"A Short Testament" by Anne Porter, from Living Things. © Zoland Books.

Photo of homeless men under the railroad bridge on University Avenue, Charlottesville; Charlottesville News & Arts.

The Blue Hymnal in a pew rack near you

A few of you have asked whether I write poetry, and the answer is yes. But most of it is a form of personal therapy and I'm not sure it should ever see the light of day beyond my notebooks. But here is one I will share with you today. May your Friday find you well, and may you discover many blessings in the mysteries of the Holiest of weeks to come.

The Hymnal (blue) 1982

By James RIchardson

O Gracious Light (twenty-five)

to dawn’s early light (seven-hundred-twenty)

You’ll find the block numbers up on the wall

       they change every week.

Then find a blue book in front of you.

So many hands hold it,

       their eyes careening across scratches

              and dots.

       mouths in Os, open, take a breath,

oh please take a breath

So many hands smudge the corners

       afraid to touch above the tiny italic,

       never veering above

              Watts, Proulx or Winkworth.

The book, after all, is silent, always.

       Or is it?

       The tunes leaping from eye to fingers to keyboard

The rest of us faking it a little,

       Or a lot.

       Warbling up and down with the dots and scratches,

              cross hatches become sounds,

              and that is a miracle if ever there was one.

Ever notice the lower corners on the cover of the Hymnal (blue) 1982?

       A little tatered, bent, flattened

specks of brown paper sticking out,

bits of cardboard fraying,

Like my voice.