The Promise and the Way He Kept It

 

Yongsung Kim

The Promise and the Way He Kept It

Isaiah 9:2-7

 

The people that walked in darkness

have seen a great light;

those who dwelt in the land of the shadow of death,

upon them a light has shined.

 

You have multiplied the nation,

and increased it's joy;

they rejoice before you according to the joy of harvest,

as men rejoice when they divide the spoil.

 

For You have broken the yoke of his burden

and the staff of his shoulder,

the rod of his oppressor, as in the day of Midian.

For every warrior's sandal from the noisy battle,

and garments rolled in blood

will be used for burning and fuel of fire.

For unto us a child is born,

unto us a Son is given;

and the government will be upon His shoulder.

And His name will be called

Wonderful,

Counselor,

the Mighty God,

Everlasting Father,

the Prince of Peace.

Of the increase of His government and peace there will be no end,

upon the throne of David and over His kingdom,

to order it and establish it with judgement and justice 

from that time forward, even forever.

the zeal of the Lord of Hosts will perform this.

 

*

 

 

Isaiah as a poet, well, if there ever were a Poet of Hope, he's It. No one stirs the heart and raises the courage like him. Every single line, one after the other, is as strong and true as it ever was - look how these words have weathered Time. 

If I was feeling worn down and discouraged by the state of the world, and someone were to say this poem aloud, it would stop me cold. Everything true and enduring and worthwhile would flood back into me in a transfusion of hope.

As the light breaks into the darkness, so the poem breaks into the despair.

The people living in oppression and suffering, the people battling and bleeding, the people struggling against insurmountable odds - are given a promise of freedom, and a kingdom of continuing and increasing justice. 

They will rejoice before God like people bringing in an overflowing harvest, like people dividing the spoil after winning a battle. And all the devastation of war, all the spilled blood and the implements of violence, will be used as fuel for fire. 

A new age will come. With the birth of a child. 

The Prince of Peace.

Emmanuel, God with us.

Jesus.

 

No poem more beautiful. 

 

 

 

 

 

Signs of Winter

 

                                                                            

Raymond Booth

Signs of Winter

 

The cat runs races with her tail. The dog
Leaps oer the orchard hedge and knarls the grass.
The swine run round and grunt and play with straw,
Snatching out hasty mouthfuls from the stack.
Sudden upon the elmtree tops the crow
Unceremonious visit pays and croaks,
Then swoops away. From mossy barn the owl
Bobs hasty out--wheels round and, scared as soon,
As hastily retires. The ducks grow wild
And from the muddy pond fly up and wheel
A circle round the village and soon, tired,
Plunge in the pond again. The maids in haste
Snatch from the orchard hedge the mizzled clothes
And laughing hurry in to keep them dry.

John Clare

An unusual restlessness, a nervous energy, a twitchy tic. Even the line "Sudden upon the elmtree tops the crow..." springs at you, jumps out of nowhere. Things are hectic, scattered. Change is imminent, and we all are unsettled - humans and animals both.

Autumn On the Land

 

Grigoriy Myasoyedov

 Autumn On the Land

 

A man, a field, silence—what is there to say?
He lives, he moves, and the October day
Burns slowly down.
                                 History is made
Elsewhere; the hours forfeit to time's blade
Don't matter here. The leaves large and small,
Shed by the branches, unlamented fall
About his shoulders. You may look in vain
Through the eyes' window; on his meagre hearth
The thin, shy soul has not begun its reign
Over the darkness. Beauty, love and mirth
And joy are strangers there.
                                             You must revise
Your bland philosophy of nature, earth
Has of itself no power to make men wise. 

 

R. S. Thomas 

I go over it - reading it again, hoping I will find a different conclusion. 

Something more hopeful.

The man, the field, and the silence.

That silence gapes. 

Meaningless! It's all empty. Even the beauty of Nature has no influence, no redeeming power.

But what is this - a sliver of hope? "The thin, shy soul has not begun its reign/Over the darkness."

How does one begin, then? Where?

 

 

Autumn

 

 

 

Heinrich Vogeler

Autumn

 

There is wind where the rose was;

Cold rain where the sweet grass was;

And clouds like sheep

 Stream o'er the steep

Grey skies where the lark was. 

 

Nought gold where your hair was;

Nought warm where your hand was;

But phantom, forlorn,

Beneath the thorn,

Your ghost where your face was.

 

Sad winds where your voice was;

Tears, tears where my heart was;

And ever with me,

Child, ever with me,

Silence where hope was.

 

Walter de la Mare 

 

 

 A painful anniversary. 

 

 

Prologue

Chris Neale

Prologue

This day winding down now
At God speeded summer's end
In the torrent salmon sun,
In my seashaken house
On a breakneck of rocks
Tangled with chirrup and fruit,
Froth, flute, fin, and quill
At a wood's dancing hoof,
By scummed, starfish sands
With their fishwife cross
Gulls, pipers, cockles, and snails,
Out there, crow black, men
Tackled with clouds, who kneel
To the sunset nets,
Geese nearly in heaven, boys
Stabbing, and herons, and shells
That speak seven seas,
Eternal waters away
From the cities of nine
Days' night whose towers will catch
In the religious wind
Like stalks of tall, dry straw,
At poor peace I sing
To you strangers (though song
Is a burning and crested act,
The fire of birds in
The world's turning wood,
For my swan, splay sounds),
Out of these seathumbed leaves
That will fly and fall
Like leaves of trees and as soon
Crumble and undie
Into the dogdayed night.
Seaward the salmon, sucked sun slips,
And the dumb swans drub blue
My dabbed bay's dusk, as I hack
This rumpus of shapes
For you to know
How I, a spinning man,
Glory also this star, bird
Roared, sea born, man torn, blood blest.
Hark: I trumpet the place,
From fish to jumping hill! Look:
I build my bellowing ark
To the best of my love
As the flood begins,
Out of the fountainhead
Of fear, rage red, manalive,
Molten and mountainous to stream
Over the wound asleep
Sheep white hollow farms


To Wales in my arms.
Hoo, there, in castle keep,
You king singsong owls, who moonbeam
The flickering runs and dive
The dingle furred deer dead!
Huloo, on plumbed bryns,
O my ruffled ring dove
in the hooting, nearly dark
With Welsh and reverent rook,
Coo rooing the woods' praise,
who moons her blue notes from her nest
Down to the curlew herd!
Ho, hullaballoing clan
Agape, with woe
In your beaks, on the gabbing capes!
Heigh, on horseback hill, jack
Whisking hare! who
Hears, there, this fox light, my flood ship's
Clangour as I hew and smite
(A clash of anvils for my
Hubbub and fiddle, this tune
On a tongued puffball)
But animals thick as thieves
On God's rough tumbling grounds
(Hail to His beasthood!).
Beasts who sleep good and thin,
Hist, in hogsback woods! The haystacked
Hollow farms in a throng
Of waters cluck and cling,
And barnroofs cockcrow war!
O kingdom of neighbors finned
Felled and quilled, flash to my patch
Work ark and the moonshine
Drinking Noah of the bay,
With pelt, and scale, and fleece:
Only the drowned deep bells
Of sheep and churches noise
Poor peace as the sun sets
And dark shoals every holy field.
We will ride out alone, and then,
Under the stars of Wales,
Cry, Multitudes of arks! Across
The water lidded lands,
Manned with their loves they'll move
Like wooden islands, hill to hill.
Huloo, my prowed dove with a flute!
Ahoy, old, sea-legged fox,
Tom tit and Dai mouse!
My ark sings in the sun
At God speeded summer's end
And the flood flowers now. 

Dylan Thomas 

Convoluted, roping, twisting words - 

Dylan, you draw us in.

Seashaken house, starfish sands, men tackled with clouds, cities of nine day's night. 

 You live in a myth-world, a deeper-than-surface, marrow-life.

You dip in and out of this place, showing us what is there, bringing as much of it back to us

as words will carry. 

Your net of words has caught for us flashes of otherwise unimagined beauty.

Is this true? Is this place really where we live?

Is the poem an Ark to carry us there?

Is it enough to envision it?

I want to walk in the holy fields.

End of Summer

 

Steven Outram

 

 End of Summer

An agitation of the air, 

A perturbation of the light

Admonished me the unloved year

Would turn on its hinge that night.

 

I stood in the disenchanted field

Amid the stubble and the stones,

Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me

The song of my marrow-bones.

 

Blue poured into summer blue,

A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,

The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew

That part of my life was over.

 

Already the iron door of the north

Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows

Order their populations forth,

And a cruel wind blows.

 

Stanley Kunitz

That moment when, doing something usual and ordinary, you feel it - something is happening. Something is changing.

Is it a leaving, or an arriving?

The phrase " turn on its hinge", and later, " the iron door" - you can almost hear the creak of it, feel it's coldness, it's finality - like a prison door.

Is Summer a room in Time's house? Or is it outside, and now we move inside, into the dark confines of an inhospitable cell?

"I stood in the disenchanted field". All the lovely sea-like grasses, gone. All the movement and sway shorn down to bristles. And then the realization "that part of my life was over".

Is this the season of disenchantment? And what happens when only the bones are left?

 Is it possible that there is a deeper magic? A magic beyond seasons, a meaning running through all times and places, an unswervable undefeatable unchangeable and glorious victorious beauty that transforms us?

That would melt an iron door.

Nobbut God

Elena Yushina

 

 

"First on, there was nobbut God." Genesis 1:1

 Yorkshire Dialect Translation

Nobbut God

            

First on

There was silence.

And God said:

'Let there be clatter.'

The wind, unclenching,

Runs its thumbs

Along dry bristles of Yorkshire Fog.

The mountain ousel

Oboes its one note.

After rain

Water lobelia

Drips like a tap

On the tarn's tight surface-tension.

But louder,

And every second nearer,

Like chain explosions

From furthest nebulae

Light-yearing across space:

The thudding of my own blood.

'It's nobbut me,'

Says God.

Norman Nicholson

 

 

The way he joins the sound of rain dripping off the petals of a flower and "chain explosions from furthest nebulae" with the sound of his beating heart!

 

It's a shock, the differences in scope. 

A raindrop, a heartbeat, an explosion -

and then the presence and voice of God.

Is it a terror or a comfort 

that He is both so close and so distant?

His voice right in my ear,

and also reaching further than I can imagine?

Oysters

Hans Iten

Oysters     Our shells clacked on the plates. My tongue was a filling estuary, My palate hung with starlight: As I tasted the salty Pleiades Orion dipped his foot into the water. Alive and violated, They lay on their beds of ice: Bivalves: the split bulb And philandering sigh of ocean. Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered. We had driven to that coast Through flowers and limestone And there we were, toasting friendship, Laying down a perfect memory In the cool of thatch and crockery. Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow, The Romans hauled their oysters south to Rome: I saw damp panniers disgorge The frond-lipped, brine-stung Glut of privilege. And was angry that my trust could not repose In the clear light, like poetry or freedom Leaning in from sea. I ate the day Deliberately, that its tang Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.     Seamus Heaney      Reading this poem I find myself trying to add up the words as if their total will be equal to the meaning.     But it doesn't work.   I start again. This time I envision the images. The sound of the shells hitting the plate, the water reflecting the stars, the constellations - and the poet feeling as if he is tasting all those. Then the image of millions of oyster shells opened up and discarded on a beach. A sense of futility, of desolation. Seamus driving through the countryside, and spending time with friends in a stone cottage, thinking as he does this about the distant past, the Romans transporting their loads of oysters across the mountains to wealthy buyers in Rome. (Is this a comment about how beauty has been sold like a product?) And then the last stanza - "I was angry that my trust could not repose in the clear light..." - what does that mean? Is it that he wants to be fully honest and open, but cannot trust how that would be received or used?  And - "I ate the day." Wonderful! First he eats the oyster, and it opens a crack in history and friendship and the desire to be fully open to others - and now, 'eating the day', he overrides his anger at not being able to trust truth to words, by turning himself from words into verbs - that is, action.    Words alive in gesture and motion.  Words speaking through his entire body, his life.   I don't know if that's what the poem is about, but I might be closer to it.

Two Campers in Cloud Country

 

Terry Watkinson

 

 

Two Campers in Cloud Country

(Rock Lake, Canada)

 

In this country there is neither measure nor balance
To redress the dominance of rocks and woods,
The passage, say, of these man-shaming clouds.

No gesture of yours or mine could catch their attention,
No word make them carry water or fire the kindling
Like local trolls in the spell of a superior being.

Well, one wearies of the Public Gardens:  one wants a vacation
Where trees and clouds and animals pay no notice;
Away from the labeled elms, the tame tea-roses.

It took three days driving north to find a cloud
The polite skies over Boston couldn't possibly accommodate.
Here on the last frontier of the big, brash spirit

The horizons are too far off to be chummy as uncles;
The colors assert themselves with a sort of vengeance.
Each day concludes in a huge splurge of vermilions

And night arrives in one gigantic step.
It is comfortable, for a change, to mean so little.
These rocks offer no purchase to herbage or people:

They are conceiving a dynasty of perfect cold.
In a month we'll wonder what plates and forks are for.
I lean to you, numb as a fossil.  Tell me I'm here.

The Pilgrims and Indians might never have happened.
Planets pulse in the lake like bright amoebas;
The pines blot our voices up in their lightest sighs.

Around our tent the old simplicities sough
Sleepily as Lethe, trying to get in.
We'll wake blank-brained as water in the dawn.

 

Sylvia Plath

 

 "It is comfortable, for a change, to mean so little."

It's interesting - that sometimes we humans long to be lost in the bigness of something else. That we want to feel small. Its a dangerous smallness, though, when you are lost in Nature, seeing that Nature likes to eat us.  I like how Plath describes the lack of measure and balance, their lostness in the rocks and clouds begins to effect them, even to erasing their sense of selfhood. Nature is soaking them up, absorbing them.

Campers beware! 

Salvage

 

 

Salvage

 

Daily the cortege of crumpled

defunct cars

goes by by the lasagna-

layered flatbed

truckload: hardtop

 

reverting to tar smudge,

wax shine antiqued to crusted

winepress smear,

windshield battered to

intact ice-tint, a rarity

 

fresh from the Pleistocene.

I like it; privately

I find esthetic

satisfaction in these

ceremonial removals

 

from the category of 

received ideas

to regions where pigeons'

svelte smoke-velvet

limousines, taxiing

 

in whirligigs, reclaim

a parking lot,

and the bag-laden

hermit woman, disencumbered

of a greater incubus,

 

the crush of unexamined

attitudes, stoutly

follows her routine,

mining the mountainsides

of our daily refuse

 

for artifacts: subversive

re-establishing

with each arcane

trash-basket dig

the pleasures of the ruined.  

 

Amy Clampitt 

 

This is an example of how words can change how you see.

"Subversive re-establishing" - exactly!

Change the way you describe something, and you change the way people see it.

Clampitt is brilliant.

"The pleasures of the ruined." 

What a phrase! 

 

 

Rain on a Cottage Roof

 

 

Rybakova Irina

Rain on a Cottage Roof

 

From within

Slight rain seems to purr;

A heavier shower murmur,

As bees hum.

Huge hands pummel and knead

The roof under

Thunder's indigo stampede.

Rain hoofs thrum.

Now hear the house become

A drum.

 

Freda Laughton

That phrase, "now hear the house",  sticks.

Why it happens that specific words in a certain order take on something more than just the usual weight of meaning - I don't know.

I like this poem, but those three words are alive.

Alzeimer's

 

Unknown

 Alzeimer's

Chairs move by themselves, and books.

Grandchildren visit, stand

new and nameless, their faces' puzzles

missing pieces. She's like a fish

in deep ocean, its body made of light.

She floats through rooms, through

my eyes, an old woman bereft

of chronicle, the parable of her life.

And though she's almost a child

there's still blood between us:

I passed through her to arrive.

So I protect her from knives,

stairs, from the street that calls

as rivers do, a summons to walk away,

to follow. And dress her,

demonstrate how buttons work,

when she sometimes looks up

and says my name, the sound arriving

like the trill of a bird so rare

it's rumored no longer to exist.

 

Bob Hicok

 

My mother too. 

It's her focus - one    thing    at    a    time. 

And her time travelling. Sometimes a child, waiting for her father to take her home, other times locked in the present, reading aloud as if tasting every word singly. I wonder as I listen if space on the page for her is different - each word an island, her eyes swimming the distance between.

She shifts from knowing us to wondering at the audacity of these strangers who think they can tell her what to do and where to go. Who are we? What place is this where people put things in front of you and expect you to to eat them when they say so? Who are you to brush her hair or cut her nails - who asked you? Why are you so pushy? Why do you want all these things?

And her plate becomes a map. Colours and textures, like forests or deserts, she picks at them gingerly, not sure of the consequences. Does this belong here? Should she move it to the West? Will there be war if mixed, this mountain and that mass? How should she manage this chaos?

Meantime, we watch her like a mystery. She has made us detectives. Which way is the wind blowing?  Where and who is she now? Am I a friend or an enemy? Every moment she changes and she changes us. We struggle to keep up or slow down. Now repeating the moment over and over (she reads the same sentence 20 times - will she move to the next one this time?), now sliding into different worlds (Where's the dog? We have no dog, but she looks for it. Did we forget to feed it?), or ascribing vile motives to our innocent attempts to help. It shocks us. What will she make of us next?

Is it sad? Yes. She is not accessible in the old ways. I wish I could ask my own dear mother - "Do you remember..?" or question her about details of our lives together that I didn't know I would need to know. It's strange, to have her and not have her. 

And no. 

Something draws me in.

Loving her isn't hard, just bewildering.

It's loving without knowing, without understanding - a blind love.

Like a seed-sprout pushing up through the black,

reaching for an unseen sun.

 

 

 

Introductions

Balthasar van der Ast

Introductions

Some of what we love

we stumble upon—

a purse of gold thrown on the road,

a poem, a friend, a great song.

And more

discloses itself to us—

a well among green hazels,

a nut thicket—

when we are worn out searching

for something quite different.

And more

comes to us, carried

as carefully

as a bright cup of water,

as new bread.

Moya Cannon

How many of the things we love have been stumbled upon, run into, or been shown us by a friend? How many times while walking have we come around a bend to a view so unexpectedly gorgeous - a tree with leaves on fire or a corner pocket of woods crowded with Queen Anne's Lace? What about the day Mung Bean and I were talking in the schoolyard and happened to look up at what I've never seen before or since - a rainbow ring around the sun?

 

So many beautiful things have found me.

 

The cobalt feather of a Stellar Jay, a Golden Cowrie shell, a piece of worm-eaten wood that looks like a miniature landscape - that's not even getting into the books that have jumped at me, or the poems, or how a painting gripped me by the neck as my eye ran over a wall...

 

Hello, gifts.

 

Glad to meet you.