The First Green of Spring

Out walking in the swamp picking cowslip, marsh

marigold,

this sweet first green of spring. Now sautéed in a pan

melting

to a deeper green than ever they were alive, this green, 

this life,

harbinger of things to come. Now we sit at the table 

munching

on this message from the dawn which says we and the 

world

are alive again today, and this is the world’s birthday. 

And

even though we know we are growing old, we are dying, 

we

will never be young again, we also know we’re still right 

here

now, today, and, my oh my! don’t these greens taste 

good.

David Budhill, Moment to Moment: Poems of a Mountain Recluse (Copper Canyon Press, 1999)

Lincoln

If it weren't for the photographs, you might think Aeschylus or
Euripides had made him up. Or that he was one of those biblical
fellows tormented to the brink of what a soul can bear. But there
he stands. Long black coat. Tall hat. Half a beard. Droopy eyes. Ears
large enough to serve several men. Like the offspring of a midwife
and a coroner. A tree impersonating a man. Alongside him, his
generals seem daunted. Anxious for the day they too will grow
into men. Then there's that odd mix of joy and sorrow etched
across his face. As when a joke hits a little too close to home. Given
all that's gone on—Gettysburg, Antietam, both Bull Runs, four
long years of war, more than half a million dead, a wife moaning
on the balconies, a child in the grave—Given all that ... why hasn't
his hair turned pure white?

 

David Shumate, Kimonos in the Closet (University of Pittsburg Press, 2013)

The Wedding Couple

     Fifteen years ago his heart

infarcted and he stopped smoking.

     At eighty he trembled

like a birch but remained vigorous

     and acute.

                       When they married,

fifty years ago, I was twelve.

     I observed the white lace

veil, the mumbling preacher, and the flowers

     of parlor silence

and ordinary absurdity; but

     I thought I stood outside

the parlor.

                 For two years she dwindled

     by small strokes

into a mannequin—speechless almost, almost

     unmoving, eyes open

and blinking, fitful in perception—

     but a mannequin that suffered

shame when it stained the bed sheet.

     Slowly, shaking with purpose,

he carried her to the bathroom,

     undressed and washed her,

dressed her in clean clothes, and carried her back

     to CNN and bed. “All

you need is love,” sang John and Paul:

     He touched her shoulder; her eyes

caressed him like a bride’s bold eyes.

 

Donald Hall, poeticous.com accessed on March 25, 2023

Yesterday

My friend says I was not a good son
you understand
I say yes I understand

he says I did not go
to see my parents very often you know
and I say yes I know

even when I was living in the same city he says
maybe I would go there once
a month or maybe even less
I say oh yes

he says the last time I went to see my father
I say the last time I saw my father

he says the last time I saw my father
he was asking me about my life
how I was making out and he
went into the next room
to get something to give me

oh I say
feeling again the cold
of my father's hand the last time
he says and my father turned
in the doorway and saw me
look at my wristwatch and he
said you know I would like you to stay
and talk with me

oh yes I say

but if you are busy he said
I don't want you to feel that you
have to
just because I'm here

I say nothing

he says my father
said maybe
you have important work you are doing
or maybe you should be seeing
somebody I don't want to keep you

I look out the window
my friend is older than I am
he says and I told my father it was so
and I got up and left him then
you know

though there was nowhere I had to go
and nothing I had to do

 

W. S. Merwin, Opening the Hand (Atheneum, 1983)

Piglet's Song

Let's find a Way today,
that can take us to tomorrow.
We'll follow that Way,
A Way like flowing water.

Let's leave behind,
the things that do not matter.
And we'll turn our lives,
to a more important chapter.

Let's take the time and try to find,
what real life has to offer.
And maybe then we'll find again,
what we had long forgotten.
Like a friend, true 'til the end,
it will help us onward.

The sun is high, the road is wide,
and it starts where we are standing.
No one knows how far it goes,
for the road is never-ending.

It goes away,
beyond what we have thought of.
It flows away,
Away like flowing water.

 

Benjamin Hoff, The Te of Piglet (Penguin Books, 1993)

Realizing Resurrection

             Were not our hearts burning within us
           while he was talking to us on the road?
                           —Luke 24.32

Our deepest grief
is not that we have lost what we loved
but that in our aloneness
our hearts burned within us
and we didn't notice.

That as we walked
through the shadowed valleys
we were accompanied
and didn't believe it.

That we were in the presence of the holy
and weren't aware.

That we, too,
because we are so beloved, are holy,
and held in the umbilical arms of life
and raised from death
and don't even realize it.

Our deepest grief
is the burning of our hearts,
not a hankering back
but a reaching forward,
the labor pain of a birth unbirthed,
a newness we haven't embraced yet,
a resurrection we haven't yet made real.

As our holiness blossoms within us
we allow ourselves to be led
by the burning of our hearts,
shedding what is expected of us—molting—
and becoming, always newly becoming
who were are created to be,
realizing resurrection.

 

Steve Garnass-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net April 20, 2023

Last Words

Forgive me for not writing sober,
I mean sooner, but I almost don’t
dare see what I write, I keep mating mistakes,
I mean making, and I’m wandering
if I’ve inherited what
my father’s got.

I first understood it when he tried
to introduce me to somebunny:
“This is my doctor,” he said,
then didn’t say more, “my daughter.”
The man kindly nodded
out the door.
I thought: is this dimension
what I’m headed for?

I mean dementia.
Not Autheimer’s, but that kind he has,
possessive aphasia: oh that’s good,
I meant to say progressive.
Talk about euthanasia!
I mean euphemasia,
nice words inside your head not there,
and it’s not progress at all.

No, he’s up against the boil
after years now of a sad, slow wall
and he’s so hungry,
I mean angry.

Me too. I need to get my rhymes in
while I still mean.  I mean can.

 

Mary Jo Salter, Zoom Rooms (Knopf, 2022) 

Becoming the Body

   Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. 

           As God has sent me, so I send you.” 

           When he had said this, he breathed on them 

           and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” 

                           —John 20.21-22

Jesus returned not to prove a point,

not to give us something to profess centuries later,

but to give us his spirit, 

to breathe his eternal, loving Life into us 

so that we would be his new risen body,

raised not as one individual but as a community.

He returned from his grave to send us out of our graves,

send us into the world to love, to forgive, to bless, 

to do justice, to labor with God for the mending of the world,

empowered not merely by optimism

but by the infinite Spirit that cannot be killed,

that endures tragedy and overpowers evil

and burrows through death to new life. 

Breathe deeply of this mystery.

As God breathes into Eden's dirt and it becomes a living being,

Jesus breathes into us and we are transformed;

we rise from the dust of our own graves, 

and become living beings, risen, reborn, truly alive.

Steve Garnass-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net April 13, 2023

 

The Silent Singer

The girls sang better than the boys,

their voices reaching All the way to God,

Sister Ann Zita insisted during those

     practice sessions

when I was told to mouth do, re, mi,

     but to go no higher,

when I was told to stand in back

    and form a perfect 0

        with my lips

although no word was ever to come out,

the silent singer in that third-grade

     class

during the Christmas Pageant and Easter

     Week, the birth and death

        of Christ lip-synched

            but unsung        

while my relatives, friends and parents

     praised my baritone,

     how low my voice was,

Balancing those higher, more childlike tones,

     my father said,

Adding depth, my mother said,

Thank God they had my huskiness to bring all

     that tinniness to earth,

     my great-aunt whispered,

so I believed for many years in miracles

     myself,

the words I'd never sung reaching their ears

     in the perfect pitch, the perfect tone,

while the others stuttered in their all-too-human

     voices to praise the Lord.

 

Len Roberts, The Silent Singer (University of Illinois Press, 2000)

The Summer I Was Sixteen

The turquoise pool rose up to meet us,

its slide a silver afterthought down which

we plunged, screaming, into a mirage of bubbles.

We did not exist beyond the gaze of a boy.

 

Shaking water off our limbs, we lifted

up from ladder rungs across the fern-cool

lip of rim. Afternoon. Oiled and sated,

we sunbathed, rose and paraded the concrete,

 

danced to the low beat of "Duke of Earl".

Past cherry colas, hot-dogs, Dreamsicles,

we came to the counter where bees staggered

into root beer cups and drowned. We gobbled

 

cotton candy torches, sweet as furtive kisses,

shared on benches beneath summer shadows.

Cherry. Elm. Sycamore. We spread our chenille

blankets across grass, pressed radios to our ears,

 

mouthing the old words, then loosened

thin bikini straps and rubbed baby oil with iodine

across sunburned shoulders, tossing a glance

through the chain link at an improbable world.

 

Geraldine Connally, Province of Fire (Iris Press, 1998)

As on a Day of Festival

Call it
the waters of salvation
or the garlands of gladness.

Call it
the grave-clothes
falling away
or call it the loosing
of the chains.

Call it
what binds us together:
fierce but
fragile but
fierce.

Call it
he will rejoice over you
with gladness;
call it
he will renew you
in his love;
call it
he will exult over you
with loud singing
as on a day
of festival.

Call it
the thin, thin place
where the veil
gives way.

Or call it this:
the path we make
when we go deep
and deeper still
into the dark
and look behind to see
the way has been lit
by our rejoicing.

 

Jan Richardson, uuwestport.org accessed on March 26, 2023 

Benediction

God banish from your house
The fly, the roach, the mouse

That riots in the walls
Until the plaster falls;

Admonish from your door
The hypocrite and liar;

No shy, soft, tigrish fear
Permit upon your stair,

Nor agents of your doubt.
God drive them whistling out.

Let nothing touched with evil,
Let nothing that can shrivel

Heart's tenderest frond, intrude
Upon your still, deep blood.

Against the drip of night
God keep all windows tight,

Protect your mirrors from
Surprise, delirium,

Admit no trailing wind
Into your shuttered mind

To plume the lake of sleep
With dreams. If you must weep

God give you tears, but leave
You secrecy to grieve,

And islands for your pride,
And love to nest in your side.

 

Stanley Kunitz, The Collected Poems (W. W. Norton, 2002)

Cross

Gentle One,
forgiving to the end,
you climb the cross of my making,
bear my judgment,
receive my evil,
returning none.

Man of sorrows,
acquainted with grief,
you suffer my wounds,
utter my cry,
descend into my tomb.

Risen One,
un-flesh-bounded,
you surrender wholly to me.
Christ in me,
unfearful of my cross,
I surrender to you.

 

Steve Garnass-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net April 10, 2020

lynching tree

come with Jesus to the lynching tree
we stand aside and nod
good thing it wasn’t you or me
but just some lamb of god

we sing our hymns we know them well
we sing our righteous songs
and so we send that boy to hell
for that will right our wrongs

some people weeping in the street
they cry the lynching tree
but we can’t quit the judgment seat
the way it has to be

the boy is dead lay out the pall
it’s finished move along
but how come he forgives us all
before we know it’s wrong

how come the god we slight and say
that it’s all right to kill
the god who died comes back our way
and loves us loves us still

it looks so dark the lynching tree
so dark for you and me
but here’s the strangest thing I see
a bud upon that tree

 

Steve Garnass-Holmes, unfoldinglight.net April 3, 2015

The VCCA Fellowship Visits the Holiness Baptist Church, Amherst, Virginia

We are the only light faces in a sea of mahogany,
tobacco, almond, and this is not the only way
we are different. We've come in late, the choir
already singing, swaying to the music, moving
in the spirit. When I was down, Lord, when
I was down, Jesus lifted me. And, for a few minutes,
we are raised up, out of our own skepticism
and doubts, rising on the swell of their voices.
The singers sit, and we pass the peace, wrapped
in thick arms, ample bosoms, and I start to think
maybe God is a woman of color, and that She loves
us, in spite of our pale selves, so far away
from who we should really be. Parishioners
give testimonials, a deacon speaks of his sister,
who's "gone home," and I realize he doesn't mean
back to Georgia, but that she's passed over. I float
on this sweet certainty, of a return not to the bland
confection of wispy clouds and angels in nightshirts,
but to childhood's kitchen, a dew-drenched June
morning, roses tumbling by the back porch.
The preacher mounts the lectern, tells us he's been
up since four working at his other job, the one
that pays the bills, and he delivers a sermon
that lightens the heart, unencumbered by dogma
and theology. For the benediction, we all join hands,
visitors and strangers enfolded in the whole,
like raisins in sweet batter. We step through the door
into the stunning sunshine, and our hearts
lift out of our chests, tiny birds flying off to light
in the redbuds, to sing and sing and sing.

 

Barbara Crooker, Line Dance (Word Press, 2008) 

Holy Week

Holy is the week …
Holy, consecrated, belonging to God …
We move from hosannas to horror
with the predictable ease
of those who know not what they do.
Our hosannas sung,
our palms waved,
let us go with passion into this week.
It is a time to curse fig trees that do not yield fruit.
It is a time to cleanse our temples of any blasphemy.
It is a time to greet Jesus as the Lord’s Anointed One,
to lavishly break our alabaster
and pour perfume out for him
without counting the cost.
It is a time for preparation …
The time to give thanks and break bread is upon us.
The time to give thanks and drink of the cup is imminent.
Eat, drink, remember:
On this night of nights, each one must ask,
as we dip our bread in the wine,
“Is it I?”
And on that darkest of days, each of us must stand
beneath the tree
and watch the dying
if we are to be there
when the stone is rolled away.
The only road to Easter morning
is through the unrelenting shadows of that Friday.
Only then will the alleluias be sung;
only then will the dancing begin.

 

Ann Weems, mypastoralponderings.com March 21, 2021