Untitled Poem

The day draws down its blinds
and aches in my bones bring
bed to my mind.
 
The promise of sleep pulls me
downwards as if to
balance the burden of gravity.
 
And there, horizontal,
the body may mend, and weakened
souls may suspire.
 
While the week shuts its eyes
and stars keep their vigil,
weary things drop
 
Into Your four-poster grace:
all-surrounding, Your love,
which sings inside sleep.

Dame Juliana and the Mule (For Julian of Norwich)

(This poem comes with a thank-you to my friend Bei-En for providing the story about Julian shaking her fist at God.)

All shall be well, she said, and all
Manner of thing shall be well. And yet
A story – perhaps apocryphal –
Tells of one glum day, when she
Went out upon a mountain road,
Riding on her mule, and found the
Rain fall heavily about them,
Keeping them from going forth.
Did the rain dampen her mind? Was
This just one rainstorm too many,
One mountain-road crisis more than
She was then equipped to bear?
The story tells, she shook her fist
Up at the God she saw beyond,
Behind the clouds and their wild storm,
And, in amongst the thundery rain,
She yelled a sterner, less calm refrain:
If this is how you treat your friends,
She cried to God, then it is no
Wonder that you don’t have many!
Do we shy away from these
Angry words? Or do we, in
Our hearts see the reflection of
Ourselves, spiteful, beneath those clouds?
All shall be well, she said, and all
Manner of thing shall be well. And yet
She, like us, knew how it goes
On windy, stormy mountain roads.
Did she forever feel the glow
Of everything always so well,
An endless state of quiet bliss?
The story tells us otherwise.
It does not show her fist retract,
Yet we ourselves all know the way
That angry fists can freeze and fall
With lowered and placated heads,
In the broken, contrite prayers of us,
The mules who moan at clouds that we
Don’t understand but fall beneath
The grace that makes all things most well.

The Treasures of Candace (Fifth Sunday of Easter)

Go to the south of the road where
In the wilderness sits one who
Has seen his nation’s full wealth,
Held in his hands the treasury key,
Has borne the trust, the security
Of Candace, his queen.
Go to where he sits, treasure locked
In between his hands. Hear him
Ask, beg, plead to have the treasure
Chest opened up for him. Show him
What he cannot see for himself.
You have the key: turn it.
Sit beside him; let the excluded
One see the beauty of words like
Amethyst and chrysolite fall
From my mouth. Show him the emeralds
That emblazon your sword; wield it.
It will surely cut his heart.
Go down to the water where the
Crystal streams shall open up to
Take him in, its child, made new,
A new explorer in a land of jewels.
Most of all, let him see the
Ruby red that flows from me.
And let the Humble One then humble
Him who has known treasures vast
Yet none like these, the treasures born
Of death and silent sacrifice.
Let him kneel, then, and throw
His treasury key into the sea.

The Least to the Greatest (For Saint James the Lesser)

The world will know enough about us, if it know this much: and even if the world know it not, it suffices so long as God knows it.
(Christina Rossetti, Time Flies: A Reading Diary)
In Portugal a statue stands
Where with one hand he holds a flame
And with the other he lifts high
Something which we cannot see.
The others have their glory-tales
Of crucifixions upside-down,
Beheadings, trips to India,
And maybe Spain. He has none.
Was he this James or that? we ask,
And scarcely can we hope for reply.
Our deepest diggings only find
A few dim guesses and blind leads.
Yet this we know:
He walked in footsteps which we all,
The greatest and the least of us,
Would give a thousand lives to walk,
And where he lives now he’ll rejoice
And lift his empty hands up high
To raise aloft the wondrous news
That one was great while he was less.

Contra Mundum (For Athanasius of Alexandria)

He wrestled with the Emperors;
His pillar stood firm, unshaking,
While all around the edifice
Quaked and quivered, prone to fall.
The world threshed about like a serpent,
Enthralling the Bride in its grip,
And charmed bishops and kings with
Its every sleek and fork-tongued word.
And as the wand’ring minstrel sang
Songs of the once when He was not,
And every town danced to the tune
Of Arius’s piper-song,
Athanasius begged them all
To look upon the God-made-flesh
And see in Him the answer to
The dying world, the godless mess,
The Image now forsaken, once
Thriving in the breath of God.
He saw the arms of living grace
Stretch out and hold us in the Word.

Enough (For the Feast of St Philip the Apostle)

Show us the Father, you pled,
And that will be enough for us.
He looked into your eyes and, with
All the gathering frustration of the teacher
Who day after day is ignored, who teaches
Quadratic equations that they be forgotten,
Beats out iambic pentameters that
They be lost in the drumming numbness of heads,
Said:
Philip, you see me. Whoever has seen
Me has surely seen the Father.
You looked back then with the blankness of one
Who hears, and hears nothing.
His words to you were a strange, stern dissonance:
A voice without sense, barking orders that cut
Right through the logic of numbers,
Claiming, among other things, that
Five loaves plus three fish made a feast.
You heard the promise of his words to you all,
Words swarming, coalescing in pictures:
A mansion full to bursting with rooms,
Places soon to be prepared at tables
Full with the feast born of mustard seeds
And all our nothing made wonderfully Everything in him.
The promise beat into your blackboard-hard ears,
You who then could not know or conceive
Of the radical grace that would grab you,
Emblazon you, sear your conscience and soul.
But somewhere in the ether of noise and confusion
You saw your reflection in his eyes fixed on you,
And held in that mirror, these two blaring symbols:
A cross bearing two loaves,
And a basket, full to the brim with bread.

Untitled Poem

The thing that takes bravery is
a sheer wall, and you’d rather scale it
carefully, with the abseil of sight
and the guide-rope of reason
with the cheers of your onlookers spurring you on.
 
Yet these ledges fall off
when you hold them too hard, and there’s no
room by this wall for onlookers,
no space for them to stand, though
they may well descend with you, if they choose.
 
Most likely, they won’t. The voices
you’ll hear most often are those
who prefer to raise their mocking cries
from the foothills and the valleys. Let them!
Their echo, flying back, will mock them too.
 
And if the sky, too, is too bright
for your darting eyes’ weak perception,
don’t wait for it to set or fall,
nor stare too hard, but let the glare
shine full upon all you can bare to see.
 
Just know that soon the time will come
to stop your circumambulation.
These rocks, though patient, decay like you,
and the majestic ground upholding you,
will wait no longer. It bids you leap.

The Broken Mystic (For the Feast of Catherine of Siena)

Oh, wretched man, the darkness of self-love does not let thee know this truth. For didst thou know it, thou wouldst choose any pain rather than guide thy life in this way; thou wouldst give thee to loving and desiring Him who Is; thou wouldst enjoy His truth in firmness, and wouldst not move about like a leaf in the wind; thou wouldst serve thy Creator, and wouldst love everything in Him, and apart from Him nothing.
(From the letters of Catherine of Siena, translated by Vida Dutton Scudder)
The life she lived
went further than is comfortable,
both for our reason and our flesh:
giving up both that which we greedily crave and that
which our Father knows we all need.
She gave up food
yet drank the discharge of the sick,
fed only on illness and the sacraments.
She took no comfort from the food of earth
and craved only the things above.
We rightly cringe at what
we know now to be sickness, not piety.
We shake at views she held which now
bring to mind the farthest flung
extremities of the Christian galaxy.
And yet she knew what we deny:
that we who love our bodies and
our comforts more than our creator
can only blow about like leaves
and leave behind the firmness of
His ground which bids us stand upon
Him alone and nothing else, and
His love which makes us hate our lives
so we might love as He has loved
and die and live as He has done.

The Shepherd, the Wolf and the Hired Hand (Fourth Sunday of Easter)

The hired hand once saw the wolf
That came upon the fold of sheep
And, hitching up his garments, fled
Far away from the looming wolf
And hid himself safe in the woods.
The sheep stood waiting, helplessly,
And bleated to the silent woods,
The cold indifference of the night.
The shepherd in another fold
Saw wolves and dangers fast approaching
And stood his ground there in the fold,
Made of himself a shield between
The savage creatures charging in
And the sheep who stood there waiting,
Helpless, near the silent woods and
The indifference of the hired hand.
The shepherd stood while the wolf pounced.
His body took the wolf’s swift blows
But gave back to the wolf each one
And in his dying killed the wolf.
My friends, my children, think upon
The shepherd and the hired hand.
I am the shepherd; you’re the sheep.
I’ll keep you safe in pastures deep.
The wolf has come to kill and steal.
The hired hand will leave you dead.
I lay my life down for my sheep,
Laid down to take it up again.

A Year of Writing Liturgically: a project in the making

A few years ago, I found, selling for the grand price of about $1.00, a tattered old copy of a book by Christina Rossetti called Time Flies: A Reading Diary. I was doing my Honours thesis that year on Victorian literature and had, as a result, discovered the Rossetti family. Dante Gabriel had frightened me, William Michael had seemed a bit self-important, but Christina had, it seemed, written some truly lovely poems. And so I had eagerly snaffled the diary and taken it home like some wondrous treasure that no-one else had spotted.

The diary, it turned out, was a series of reflections and poems cycling through the Anglican liturgical year (Rossetti was a devout High Anglican, quite an unusual thing at a time when much of the English intellectual elite of the day was turning away from the state church towards Catholicism). I had recently become a fairly low Anglican myself but was starting, through a few church experiences I had at the time, to see the value in liturgy as a way of helping guide our devotional lives, and as something of an anchor through the passing of time.

I have to-ed and fro-ed in my thinking on the subject, staying in the years since in the low-to-Charismatic end of the Anglican church. But something happened to me this year that set me on a path towards the project that I have now embarked upon: I set myself the task during Lent 2012 of not giving something up, rather taking up writing a poem for each of the 40 days of the season. The exercise proved so valuable both spiritually and artistically that I decided I wanted to keep up the discipline. Shortly before Easter I reflected that I could always write a poem for each day of the Liturgical calendar. Very quickly, that idea, half-formed at a bus stop in Sydney during the Easter holidays, turned into a task that I was very publicly undertaking.

There are distinct challenges to this kind of task. One challenge – the least of them, I suspect – is the discipline required. This is more of a benefit than a challenge; regular writing is good for me, and having several “deadlines” per week helps ensure that I actually am writing, not just belly-aching about wanting to write. The more serious challenge lies in the nature of the Liturgical calendar. Among the many good and helpful nods to giants of the faith – the early church leaders, the key theologians and thinkers of the past, the reformers and prophets of recent history – and the all-too-important reminders of Jesus’ life and ministry, there are occasional curve-balls, the feast days for saints who, on closer inspection, may almost be better forgotten. There’s the challenge of regularly familiarising myself with figures who, perhaps a few days earlier, I had never heard of, the creative challenges of turning hurried research into something artistically meaningful and worthwhile.

There is also the knowledge that I am not doing something entirely new. Christina Rossetti set herself a remarkably similar task, as did John Keble, whose sequence of poems, The Christian Year, receives something of a nod in the title for my project, The Swelling Year (a reference to one of the first poems in the sequence). Will each poem that I write be any good? Will others benefit from what I am doing? These questions will, of course, fill my mind as I go.

There is also an issue of integrity: will I, at times, be testifying to things which, on the day I write them, may be far from my mind or heart? This last issue, however, is less problematic than it seems. If the Liturgical year is of any value, it is as that anchor I mentioned before, not so much to the past as to the core of Christian life. It holds us in the Word of God, by prompting us to look back each day at truths that we might prefer on that occasion to ignore. It also reminds us of the lives of those who have gone before us, fought the fight, run the race and are remembered for it. This, on days when I feel like doing anything other than fighting the fight or running the race, is a very good thing. If I find in my poetry truths which would otherwise be far from me, then I am not being dishonest; I am, in fact, being more truthful in my poetry that day than I am in my heart.

And so the year swells ahead, pregnant with challenges, truth and expectation. Let’s watch it fold and unfold, swell and unswell, before us, one poem at a time.