Category Archives: Devotional

Indecisive Spring (After W.H. Auden’s “Under Sirius”)

One of Auden’s more challenging but also most remarkable poems is “Under Sirius”, written as a response to medieval Latin poet Fortunatus who, by Auden’s account, longed for humanity to experience some sort of tragedy to shake them to their senses. Auden’s inspiration came from the time known as the “dog days”, associated with theContinue reading “Indecisive Spring (After W.H. Auden’s “Under Sirius”)”

For there we hung our harps

On the poplars, drooping, drooping, weeping in the river’s run, there we hung our harps, no singing; singing is now silent, dead. The songs are gone, our tongues are weeping; singing is now silent, dead. Where’s the Zion of our singing, weeping in the river’s run? Zion is a memory, fading, weeping in the river’sContinue reading “For there we hung our harps”

Poems for World Mental Health Day 2013

Today is World Mental Health Day, and it’s becoming a tradition at The Consolations of Writing for me to put together a collection of 10 poems (for the 10th of the 10th) which explore mental health issues. I hope that these poems can be of comfort and encouragement. To everyone who struggles with mental illness:Continue reading “Poems for World Mental Health Day 2013”

All the wisdom of Babylon

“The thing that the king asks is difficult, and no one can show it to the king except the gods, whose dwelling is not with flesh.” They can only rearrange, those magi whose god is their own minds. Taking what is known already, they squint first through this eye then that. Ask for wisdom, theyContinue reading “All the wisdom of Babylon”

What It Is

is a giving, a direction,             a relation to God, a movement within the eternal.          At His core is what we fail to be, to do, to know.             And so we love to show             what we are not and what He is:             relationship, community, righteous love, perfected from             the start,Continue reading “What It Is”

Like Love (After W.H. Auden’s “Law, say the gardeners, is the sun”)

The first of our Auden poems for the month is the wonderful “Law, say the gardeners, is the sun”, a poem that Auden wrote in 1939 around the time of his conversion to Christianity. It was famously written shortly after his profound and emphatic “September 1, 1939”, the poem he wrote on the outbreak ofContinue reading “Like Love (After W.H. Auden’s “Law, say the gardeners, is the sun”)”