Love

Love

Fragile as a spider's web

Hanging in space

Between tall grasses,

It is torn again and again.

A passing dog

Or simply the wind can do it.

Several times a day

I gather myself together

And spin it again.

Spiders are patient weavers.

They never give up.

And who knows

What keeps them at it?

Hunger, no doubt,

And hope.

May Sarton

fr. Halfway To Silence

“Several times a day/I gather myself together/And spin it again.” The spiderweb as a metaphor for the fragility of love is a clear example of the practical usefulness of poetry. To have this metaphor show a web as both a work of beauty and a necessity; an expression of hunger and  hope, and how it requires daily, patient attention and repair, clearly shows me what love is  - not a falling into, like an inevitable accident, or a chemistry, like an inevitable combustion, or a fever, like an inavoidable illness, but a patient, moment by moment paying attention. An acceptance of damage, injury, and luck (bad and good). A commitment to starting over and over, to beginning anew  - every day.

Patience, that's love. Not giving up, that's love.

The web seems fragile, but as you no doubt remember, spider silk is stronger than steel.

The Instinct of Hope

Unknown

The Instinct of Hope

Is there another world for this frail dust

To warm with life and be itself again?

Something about me daily speaks there must,

And why should instinct nourish hopes in vain?

'Tis nature's prophesy that such will be,

And everything seems struggling to explain

The close sealed volume of its mystery.

Time wandering onward keeps its usual pace

As seeming anxious of eternity,

To meet that calm and find a resting place.

E'en the small violet feels a future power

And waits each year renewing blooms to bring,

And surely man is no inferior flower

To die unworthy of a second spring?

John Clare

 "Why should instinct nourish hopes in vain?" Now that's a good question.
(John Clare! The more of his poems I read, the more I like them.) This line - "everything seems struggling to explain/the close sealed volume of its mystery."  A hidden-in-plain-sight secret? If all of nature dies, or lies dormant, hibernates, but "feels a future power", should we not trust to this also? I like that "surely man is no inferior flower". We have dormant seasons too; times of holding back, of waiting, of saying goodbye, of letting go. And all these are a kind of preparation, a storing up - of strength? of hope? of "future power"? Nature shows us faithfully, year after year, a new season is coming.

O Emmanuel

J. Kirk Richards

O Emmanuel

O come, O come, and be our God-with-us

O long-sought With-ness for a world without,

O secret seed, O hidden spring of light.

Come to us Wisdom, come unspoken Name

Come Root, and Key, and King, and holy Flame,

O quickened little wick so tightly curled,

Be folded with us into time and place,

Unfold for us the mystery of grace

And make a womb of all this wounded world.

O heart of heaven beating in the earth,

O tiny hope within our hopelessness

Come to be born, to bear us to our birth,

To touch a dying world with new-made hands

And make these rags of time our swaddling bands.

Malcolm Guite

“O tiny hope within our hopelessness”. I love how the life of Jesus curls both inward and outward in this poem. Mysteries within mysteries, but at the same time, revelations opening into wider and yet wider horizons. Foldings and unfoldings. So beautiful. Like the whorls of shells or the swirling stars, all these seem to speak of the same pattern, the same name. Unspoken, but singing out through everything.

 

Snowdrops

Raymond Booth

Snowdrops

Do you know what I was, how I lived?  You know

what despair is; then

winter should have meaning for you.

I did not expect to survive,

earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect

to waken again, to feel

in damp earth my body

able to respond again, remembering

after so long how to open again

in the cold light

of earliest spring—

afraid, yes, but among you again

crying yes risk joy

in the raw wind of the new world.

Louise Gluck

"Do you know how I lived?" I think this must be the cry of everyone who has lived through trauma and death. There's this great burden of pain and isolation that screams inside, "You don't know me! You don't know how I live! You don't know what I'm going through!" And yet, we can't express it, either. We know there is no true way of explaining it. We know it won't be grasped. This is a powerful poem because it acknowledges all that, even the "I did not expect to survive", which is something we don't talk about much, but some of us have lived through things we feel should have killed us. It is strange and disorienting to find one's self still breathing. How can it be? How is it my body still cycles on? How is it the days pass? Something died. Something was injured and killed within me. There has been blackness and despair and anger and grief, and yet I open my eyes and find I'm still here. Whether I want to be or not. In the poem this is called Winter. Winter is death, dormancy, burial. But it is a season. And seasons pass. And then the most surprising thing of all happens. We discover we're not dead, we're a seed. And a new pain comes, the visceral pain of breaking out of our seed-casing, of pushing up against the blackness that covers us, of rising in spite of the fear we feel. "Crying yes risk joy". I don't know of a better way to say it.

Sometimes

Cecile Veilhan

Sometimes

Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse.  Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss, sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen:  may it happen for you.

Sheenagh Pugh

I have this thought-habit of preparing for the worst case scenario. Sometimes (!) it helps. I sort out in my head what I will do if things go wrong, then I go ahead and jump in. But sometimes...it's a trap. Manytimes without knowing it, I simply anticipate that everything will fall apart. And frankly, because of what has happened in the past, I have been anticipating this for my family. I have been living in fear and dread. I don't want to do this anymore. I want to anticipate good. I want to hold up my hope-light and live in its warmth. (Hence this painting and poem.) One thing I know - love repels fear. I need to go to the source and fill myself so everlastingly full of it that it spills over. I need to get into the current of love and allow it to carry me through. This poem reminds me that I truly do believe God is good. I can expect good things from him. I can remember the battle is won. Love wins. Everytime.



   

Sonnet

Concetta Flore

Sonnet

Think, love, how when a starry night of frost

Is ended, and the small, pale winter sun

Shines on the garden trellis, ice-embossed,

And the stiff frozen flower-stalks, every one;

And turns their fine embroideries of ice

Into a loosening silver, skein by skein,

Warming cold leaves and stones, till, in a trice,

The garden smiles, and breathes, and lives again,

And further think, how the poor frozen snail

Creeps out with trembling horn to feel that heat,

And thaws the snowy mildew from his mail,

And stretches with all his length from his retreat:

Will he not praise, with all his heart, the sun?

Then think, at last, I too am such a one.

Conrad Aiken 

"Fine embroideries of ice..." 
"The garden smiles, and breathes, and lives again..."
Just beautiful. The smallest sign of hope, of Spring, lifts our hearts.

Outlook

N. Ustinov

Outlook

Not to be conquered by these headlong days,
But to stand free: to keep the mind at brood
On life's deep meaning, nature's altitude
Of loveliness, and time's mysterious ways;
At every thought and deed to clear the haze
Out of our eyes, considering only this,
What man, what life, what love, what beauty is,
This is to live, and win the final praise.
Though strife, ill fortune, and harsh human need
Beat down the soul, at moments blind and dumb
With agony; yet, patience—there shall come
Many great voices from life's outer sea,
Hours of strange triumph, and, when few men heed,
Murmurs and glimpses of eternity.

Archibald Lampman


I read that and almost have nothing to say, it seems so fully expressed. What I can say is that I love these kind of poems, these stand-still-take-a-breath-and-remember words. A poem like this would be worth memorizing, something to have ready for those times when I get bogged in my own miry clay. Words that help me stand up straight and notice the hopeful signs and the reasons to keep moving toward them.