Category: poetry

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For Christmas Day

We live in a time, as in many eras, of no peace and human needs most plentiful.  How is it that we can be merry?  Or have hope?

The poem by Rossetti speaks to this mixed reality especially jarring this year.

A Rose Has Thorns as well as Honey

by Christina Rossetti

A rose has thorns as well as honey,
I’ll not have her for love or money;
An iris grows so straight and fine,
That she shall be no friend of mine;
Snowdrops like the snow would chill me;
Nightshade would caress and kill me;
Crocus like a spear would fright me;
Dragon’s-mouth might bark or bite me;
Convolvulus but blooms to die;
A wind-flower suggests a sigh;
Love-lies-bleeding makes me sad;
And poppy-juice would drive me mad:—
But give me holly, bold and jolly,
Honest, prickly, shining holly;
Pluck me holly leaf and berry
For the day when I make merry.

The Rose’s Honey: The most recorded Christmas carol, a moment where all is calm and bright.

Love’s Thorns-Making Merry

A different way to celebrate the season’s complex reality: Fairytale of New York, by Shane MacGowan.

An Irish Christmas story performed two weeks ago at the composer’s  funeral.  (from wikipedia) “Shane Patrick MacGowan (25 December 1957 – 30 November 2023) was a British-born Irish[a] singer-songwriter and musician best known as the lead vocalist and primary lyricist of Celtic punk band the Pogues.”

My colleagues Ed Callahan and Bucky Sebastian always told me Irish funerals were to be joyous events. At this service two weeks ago the congregation sings and dances to this ballad of an all too human realty this time of year.

Please share your joy with all you meet today by giving each a Christmas Hug.

Christmas eve’s rising moon.

 

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“Advent 1955”-Still in 2023?

A thought for the season by English poet John Betjeman: Advent 1955

The Advent wind begins to stir
With sea-like sounds in our Scotch fir,
It’s dark at breakfast, dark at tea,
And in between we only see
Clouds hurrying across the sky
And rain-wet roads the wind blows dry
And branches bending to the gale
Against great skies all silver pale
The world seems travelling into space,
And travelling at a faster pace
Than in the leisured summer weather
When we and it sit out together,
For now we feel the world spin round
On some momentous journey bound –
Journey to what? to whom? to where?
The Advent bells call out ‘Prepare,
Your world is journeying to the birth
Of God made Man for us on earth.’

And how, in fact, do we prepare
The great day that waits us there –
For the twenty-fifth day of December,
The birth of Christ?
For some it means
An interchange of hunting scenes
On coloured cards,
And I remember
Last year I sent out twenty yards,
Laid end to end, of Christmas cards
To people that I scarcely know –
They’d sent a card to me, and so
I had to send one back. Oh dear!
Is this a form of Christmas cheer?
Or is it, which is less surprising,
My pride gone in for advertising?
The only cards that really count
Are that extremely small amount
From real friends who keep in touch
And are not rich but love us much
Some ways indeed are very odd
By which we hail the birth of God.

We raise the price of things in shops,
We give plain boxes fancy tops
And lines which traders cannot sell
Thus parcell’d go extremely well
We dole out bribes we call a present
To those to whom we must be pleasant
For business reasons. Our defence is
These bribes are charged against expenses
And bring relief in Income Tax
Enough of these unworthy cracks!
‘The time draws near the birth of Christ’.
A present that cannot be priced
Given two thousand years ago
Yet if God had not given so
He still would be a distant stranger
And not the Baby in the manger.

Sir John Betjeman, CBE, was an English poet, writer, and broadcaster. He was Poet Laureate from 1972 until his death in 1984. He was a founding member of The Victorian Society and a passionate defender of Victorian architecture. He began his career as a journalist and ended it as one of the most popular British Poets Laureate and a much-loved figure on British television.

 Love’s Multiple Meanings

Craig Hella Johnson is an American choral conductor, composer, and arranger.  He was born on June 15, 1962, in Crow Wing County, Minnesota

One unique aspect of Johnson’s programming is his signature “collage” style, or composed programs that marry music and poetry to seamlessly blend the sacred and secular as well as the classical and contemporary.

In an interview he notes: Music is a spiritual language of the freest kind. It doesn’t matter what your denomination or nonbelief or tradition is, because it’s about connecting with something larger than ourselves. 

This work combines the well known Christmas carol Lo, How a Rose E’re Blooming, with a poem, The Rose.

This was the final song of our Christmas concert yesterday.  As you listen, it may bring a tear or two.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qy53eILctNQ&t=12s)

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The Thanks in Giving

We give for many reasons and are better for it.

Poet Alberto Ross provides an understanding.

When Giving Is All We Have 

We give because someone gave to us.
We give because nobody gave to us.

We give because giving has changed us.
We give because giving could have changed us.

We have been better for it,
We have been wounded by it—

Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,
Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.

Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,
But we read this book, anyway, over and again:

Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,
Mine to yours, yours to mine.

You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.
Together we are simple green. You gave me

What you did not have, and I gave you
What I had to give—together, we made

Something greater from the difference.
 

One river gives its journey to the next.

A Teacher’s Story

 

 

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Veteran’s Day 2023: The Warrior’s Spirit

Ulysses  (or Old soldiers’ spirits never die)

by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Come, my friends.
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
the sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be that we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are-
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

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Two Ways of Reflecting on  Life’s Possibilities: The Poetic and the Practical

The Poetic

A teenager’s college essay on the value and difficulty of alternative ways of seeing the world  from the Free Press:

“In another scene from The History Boys, one English schoolboy preparing for Oxbridge entrance exams, Timms, asks Hector why they are reading the poetry of A. E. Housman instead of doing something “practical.” 

Timms: I don’t always understand poetry!

Hector: You don’t always understand it? Timms, I never understand it. But learn it now, know it now, and you will understand it. . . whenever.

Timms: I don’t see how we can understand it. Most of the stuff poetry’s about hasn’t happened to us yet.

Hector: But it will, Timms. It will. And then you will have the antidote ready!

Like Timms, I sometimes don’t understand what I’m learning or memorizing when I study poetry, but I believe Hector when he says it prepares us for the very real events of the world—going to war, falling in love, falling out of love, making a friend, losing a friend, having a child, losing a child. 

Understanding ancient authors as they understood themselves is the surest means of finding alternatives to our current way of seeing the world.”

The Pragmatic

From Jake Meador’s essay, The Misunderstood Reason Why Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church:

“Contemporary America simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success.

Such a system leaves precious little time or energy for forms of community that don’t contribute to one’s own professional life or, as one ages, the professional prospects of one’s children. Workism reigns in America, and because of it, community in America, religious community included, is a math problem that doesn’t add up.” 

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The Power of the Spoken Word

Words matter.  It is how we connect with each other.

Whether by blog post or biblical story,  words are how we navigate every aspect of life.

They can get stale, “decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,/Will not stay still,” as T.S. Eliot writes.

They get worn from overuse until reality brings us back to their core meaning.

Poetic usage has the potential to change how we understand meaning, transience versus transformative experience.   Here is  English writer Joesph Pearce describing poetry’s potential:

Poetry is the still, small voice of calm in a world gone mad with distraction. It finds us space to breathe. It allows us time to think. It takes us out of time and space into the realm of metaphysics. It takes us from the transient things to the permanent things, from the things of time to the things of eternity. It takes us to goodness, truth and beauty. Poetry takes us from the five physical senses to the five metaphysical senses: humility, gratitude, wonder, contemplation and dilation.

The Power of Voice

When I saw this poetry video “musical”  the power of poetry became even more dramatic.

“The forgotten dialect of the heart”

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R0zvidlfDs)

 

 

 

 

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Truth Telling Gradually

“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant —”

By |

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

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What Hot Summer Can Do to a Person

THE SLUGGARD

by Isaac Watts

’Tis the voice of the Sluggard: I heard him complain,
“You have wak’d me too soon, I must slumber again;”
As the door on its hinges, so he on his bed,
Turns his sides, and his shoulders, and his heavy head.

“A little more sleep, a little more slumber,”
Thus he wastes half his days and his hours without number;
And when he gets up he sits folding his hands,
Or walks about saunt’ring, or trifling he stands.

I pass’d by his garden, and saw the wild brier,
The thorn and the thistle, grow broader and higher.
The clothes that hang on him are turning to rags:
And his money still wastes, till he starves or he begs.

I made him a visit still hoping to find
He had took better care for improving his mind:
He told me his dreams, talk’d of eating and drinking;
But he scarce reads his Bible, and never loves thinking.

Said I then to my heart, “Here’s lesson for me;
That man’s but a picture of what I might be:
But thanks to my friends for their care in my breeding,
Who taught me betimes to love working and reading.

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A Holy Week Theme: Money Changers and Temples

Managing money has always been political. And always will be.

A measure for credit unions:  “The extent to which we apply social values more than mere monetary profit.”

FDR and Credit Unions: “Push This”

Temples and Money:  Old and Modern

Cleansing the Temple

by Malcolm Guite

Come to your Temple here with liberation

And overturn these tables of exchange

Restore in me my lost imagination

Begin in me for good, the pure change.

Come as you came, an infant with your mother,

That innocence may cleanse and claim this ground

Come as you came, a boy who sought his father

With questions asked and certain answers found,

Come as you came this day, a man in anger

Unleash the lash that drives a pathway through

Face down for me the fear the shame the danger

Teach me again to whom my love is due.

Break down in me the barricades of death

And tear the veil in two with your last breath.

 

 

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Love on Valentine’s Day

Esther Howland invented the greeting card as a Valentine Day occasion.  Her greeting cards are works of art. A sampling of them can be found at Wikimedia Commons  Search media – Wikimedia Commons.

This beginning of this holiday tradition is described in an excerpt from the Jefferson Educational Society, Book Notes # 31, Love Poems for Valentine’s Day:

“The story goes that while working in her father’s stationery shop she received a Valentine card from a competitor. She thought it simple and unattractive. Saying to herself, ‘I can do better than this,’ she did. She set up a small factory in the third floor of her parent’s home, hired some women she trained in the arts of paper cutting and origami. She soon outgrew the space, opened a factory and in the process created the American greeting card industry.”

After cutting and pasting my own Valentine’s cards for my mom and teachers in grade school,  the day became more personal in high school.  In English literature classes poetry, especially sonnets, were introduced as  the language of romance.  Two examples.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her husband Robert Browning:

How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet #43)

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace.

I love thee to the level of every day’s

Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.

I love thee freely, as men strive for right.

I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use

In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.

I love thee with a love I seemed to lose

With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,

Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,

I shall but love thee better after death.

Sonnet #  116   by William Shakespeare

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments; love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no, it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand’ring bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his heighth be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

—-If this be error and upon me proved,

—-I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

A Sonnet Upon Departing

As a memory of high school  poetry exercises and first love, I received  the following sonnet from my girlfriend when I left home in June 1962 for a summer ranch job  in Wyoming.

The sadness which I knew was drawing near, 

And which I feared would grow as you had gone,

That sadness now has come, yet with my tear 

Shines half a smile, like fog at early dawn.

No longer do I dread your last goodby,     

Your parting kiss, your hand’s sweet lingering touch,

A bond will now transport my longing sigh 

To you, dear heart, who’ll surely long as much. 

So happy am I just to think of you,     

Remembering half a hundred joyful days, 

Anticipating half a million new,   

When you return, and laughter skips and plays.     

I’ll miss you, darling yes, but now instead 

of grieving so, I’ll dream of what’s ahead.