Qui Habitat (First Sunday of Lent)

Continuing my Lent poems with the first Sunday of the season, I am beginning a series of poems based on parallels between Jesus’ ministry and the Psalms. Today’s poem takes its title and some of its ideas from Psalm 91, which is called “Qui Habitat” in Latin, from the opening line, “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High…” It is a beautiful promise of protection for those who trust in God and obey Him, captured perfectly in Jesus’ time of testing in the wilderness.

Qui Habitat (First Sunday of Lent)

Because he is bound to me in love,
therefore will I deliver him;
I will protect him, because he knows my Name.
(Psalm 91:14)

Son of Man:
You are weak in your hunger
And the elements conspire against you with rock.
You could change it all with a knee
Bent in worship towards dust.
Son of Man, stand:
You shall not live by bread alone
And these words from the Father’s mouth will feed you,
Weary and weak.
Son of Man, stand firm.

Son of God:
You have left behind Your home;
All the Universe was Your kingdom, the heavens Your throne.
All scepters could be Yours now if you bowed
Down to the dust and the serpent that slides.
New Adam, stand firm.
Your Father declares, Because he is mine,
Because he is bound in love to me, I
Will deliver him. Stand:
Son of God, Stand firm.

Son of Man:
The desert encloses with all its sand
And the day after day of resistance erodes you.
These rocks tempt you to hurl yourself from the cliff;
Son of God: stand.
He will not let you strike your foot
And He will command His angels towards you.
Yet you must wait;
The desert holds you a moment longer.
Son of God, Son of Man,
Stand firm; you are held
In arms far bigger than the desert’s worst demons.

Hope in C Major

I had the idea for this poem playing over in my head this evening on the way home from the working week. If you’ve followed my poetry much over the past year or so you might have noticed that often what I write can be quite dark or melancholy. Today’s poem expresses perhaps my desire to express myself in other ways, and the joy that comes from finding a more positive tune to sing.

Hope in C Major

I have long rehearsed these minor keys;
I know every diminished chord.
Atonal clusters sound in me;
I linger on sharps and flats.

But sometimes my fingers stumble on
A chord that rings bright and true,
And all my minor chords resolve
With notes that sing like home,

My hand stretched out across the keys,
Surprised to find beneath
My fingers’ disarray three notes
That hold together me,

Rearranged yet still my ears
Know what chord they now hear:
A sound of resolution and
A space for songs to rest.

Alphabet (For Cyril and Methodius, Missionaires and Translators)

Today’s poem is written in honour of brothers Cyril and Methodius, the ninth-century missionaries and translators who are credited with developing an early form of the Cyrillic alphabet as a means of expressing spiritual truths in Slavic tongues.

Alphabet (For Cyril and Methodius)

As He speaks our languages,
Blazing truth in every tongue,
Cataloguing all His grace to
Deaf ears and dumb hearts;

Every eye must see the shapes
Formed in alphabets of truth.
God Himself gives words their sound;
He takes our scribbled, muted forms,
Incoherent without Him,
Jumbled-up without His truth, and
Kisses them with life.

Letters without meaning and
Mnemonics without purpose
Now jump forth from printed page,
Opened up before our eyes.

Pages breathing Spirit’s flame, our
Quaking hearts can read –
Read the truth, eternal, deep,
Syntax crafted in God’s heart,
Truth contained in alphabet:
Useless if our eyes are closed,
Violent in the minds it scans,

Working down deep into bone,
X-ray of our marrow,
Year on year always the same, the
Zero point of truth.

Ashes and Oil (Ash Wednesday)

Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent in the Christian calendar. Typically it is a day of repentance, marking the beginning of forty days of fasting as we lead into Easter. But today, looking at the readings set for the day, I found a pleasantly surprising pattern in what the readings were saying: that fasting with self-indulgent sorrow is not what God requires, but a penitent and faithful heart, and a desire to love the poor and needy. I have tried to pick up on some, though not all, of these themes in my poem for the day, and will hopefully be able to reflect on these ideas as Lent goes on.

You may want to look at the Ash Wednesday readings yourself to help guide your own thinking. The value of Lent, I think, is to prepare our hearts for Easter so we do not get distracted by the eggs and the bunnies but think instead about the cross, which lies at the heart of the Christian faith. I hope this Lent can be a blessed time for all of you – and please feel free to share your thoughts and prayers here as we work through Lent together.

Ashes and Oil (Ash Wednesday)

Lord have mercy.
We smear our faces ashen black
And leave our hearts the same dark hue.
Lord have mercy;
Write into
Our dusty hearts Your truth.

God have mercy.
If only our foreheads bear the ash,
Our hearts have not knelt at Your Cross.
God have mercy;
Make our hearts
Penitent and true.

Christ have mercy.
Obedient in that forty-day desert,
You triumph where we can only fail.
Christ have mercy;
Jesus, be
The righteousness we crave.

Lord have mercy.
You do not despise what You have made
And You animate our ashen hearts.
Lord have mercy;
Breathe in us.
Anoint our heads with oil.

The Veil (Last Sunday After Epiphany)

The veil is lifted, but do we see
His face as it truly is?
Like Peter we struggle to tie Him to ground
But He is not contained.

He sits enthroned before cherubim
But see Him take His throne
Upon a Roman cross, among
Rebels and dirty thieves.

The veil is lifted, but do we see
His face as it truly is?
Do we see His glory fulfilled
In a death that makes us flee?

Look into His goodness now:
The veil’s gone; you can see.
Look at His face and see His scars.
Now follow Him to the tree.

Blessed

How can it be –
The motions of my heart deny it;
The story I see behind me,
The imprints of my feet in the soil,
Declare that it’s not so.
 
Yet my eyes make my other senses fools;
Fruit grows where I had only death,
Flowers burst from the driest ground,
Trees flourish where there was no water –
How can it be?
 
How can it be that I should gain –
The ledger says that all is lost,
That debts like mine cannot be paid
And every day that I have lived
Has shown this to be true.
 
Yet my spirit sings another song;
The poor in spirit sing with me.
For blessed are the weakest and
Loudest sing those who have mourned.
In every unexpected joy –
My God, how can it be?

Spenserian Sonnet No. 4: Exhaustion

This week was my students’ first week back at school and, unsurprisingly, it has been a tiring week. Typically my mind slips back into old patterns of defeated thinking when I am this tired. But tonight I found comfort in my favourite type of poem to write – the Spenserian sonnet. I hope it can speak on behalf of other exhausted people everywhere at the end of another working week.

Spenserian Sonnet No. 4: Exhaustion

The week slowly digging its stubborn heels
Into the soil of all our Fridays
And wet dirt clinging to the spinning wheels
Of bright tomorrow’s plans and eager ways,

All things slow down as memory replays
How yesterday our eagerness turned cold
(And last year too was full of yesterdays
Which ended with those endings that we’ve told).

It does not pay, they say, to be too bold
Or spark yourself alight with fiery zeal.
Yet some there are who smile, being old,
And hold still tight to what our failures steal:

The knowledge that tomorrow, sure as sun,
Brings stories fresh and yet to be begun.

Quatrina: New Land

This is a poem I wrote today, in a new form that I’m experimenting with. As far as I’m aware, it’s a new form – perhaps someone else has stumbled on it too, but so far I haven’t come across any other examples of it. The pattern is simple enough – a cycle of rhymes with alternating stanzas mirroring the rhyming pattern of the stanza before, and then closing with a couplet that takes the first and last rhyme of the opening stanza. I’ve called the form a “quatrina”, because it’s a little like the tritina or the sestina in terms of the cycling rhymes, though there are some obvious differences. I hope that you like reading it.

Quatrina: New Land

We haven’t learnt this path before;
It challenges with every step,
With all its new ways and its hopes
That sound like tongues to our old ears.

We haven’t learnt to bypass tears
Nor learnt to be calm on these slopes.
We must give up these fears we’ve kept
If we hope to hope for more.

Our neurons know the ancient score,
The pathways they have learnt and leapt,
And though the spirit vainly gropes,
It knows the well-worn tale of years.

But there is time to rewrite fears
And teach our stories other tropes.
There is truth in dreams we’ve wept
And longings trapped in silent stores,

For there’s new land on other shores
And promises more pure than tears.

Exchange (For the Martyrs of Japan)

What threat they posed we cannot know,
These men who asked permission
To build their churches and to go
Forth with their love’s mission.

What risks the shogun saw in those
Who came to love and free,
We cannot say; but how it goes
For servants is to be

In life and death just like the one
Whom they in all things serve,
And so they did shine like the Son
In flames they did not deserve,

And bore the flames and bore the cross
And bore scars in their side,
Pierced by spears like Jesus was,
Some like Him crucified.

What threat they posed, we cannot know
But this we know for sure:
That those who like Him gladly go
To death He will restore,

And those who gladly own His name
Before the threats of kings
He will own, and take their shame
And change their place for His.

Not Jewels (For Angsar, Bishop)

Angsar:
A picture shows you robed in green
With gold-gilt sleeves and sparkling jewels.
You hold a church within your hands:
A church with mighty steeple.
And yet you felt the weight of this,
The church you strove to build;
You felt the weight of failure and
The journeys which did not succeed,
The schools which failed to grow.

Angsar:
Your visions did not save you, nor
The churches that you built.
You knew the way that we must sow
These humble seeds in dead of night,
In unforgiving soil.
Angsar, know: Christ’s church holds you
When kings defy your noble efforts. Know it is not jewels nor gold:
It’s He who makes us sparkle.