Poetry Four 2011

These poems, music and extracts are loosely linked to the theme of Creation and the early Genesis stories which are the First Readings of the Mass for the next couple of weeks.

Image above from Invisible children

God's Grandeur

by Gerald Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. 

God on the Treadmill

by Benjamin S. Grossberg

Sometimes it takes miles to give up resistance,

though the mirror shows a body unresisting, shows

perhaps something to admire. Others may.

A body without difficulty loosening, breaking

its own willfulness, cracking itself

like a rusted bolt that finally begins to turn.

A body that turns. Toward openness, fantasy,

those desires of and not of the body. Sometimes

I notice a powerful man engaged steadily

repeating difficult action: folding himself, his tight

skin, over and over, lifting a declined torso

or pulling up a suspended trunk, and think,

how neat, how controlled to be inside that body.

I struggle not to stare, grip myself not to lose myself

inside the thought of being inside that body.

I can never get there I know because it is

the image I want, the veneer of muscle

having taken primacy from mind, now first

among equals: bicep, abdominal, quadricep,

the launch after launch of a perpetual run.

I want the image even when I am it, or nearly it—

because even then, I am also that other thing,

self-conscious, burdened, struggling for movement.

If there is a link between God and animals—

the way He identifies with the so much

that isn’t us, as He had to have, to have made them—

it must be in the body enacting will immediate

through movement, as if with a word

creating a world (enacting creation immediate

through speech). Which is to say, this is my time

of prayer, my only time: miles in, as long

as it takes for the body to relinquish resistance.

Bright, public, surrounded by others who move

toward better movement. And all the while seeing

in a wall of mirrors that image of myself, deer,

horse, running close kin to breathing, motion

necessary to survival, perfect image of a man

that I’m merely a self-conscious copy of.

I pray for things, of course, for myself

and for those whose pain touches me, selfish

and unselfish prayers for intimates and strangers.

I pray for the runner in the mirror, too, sleek, easy

animal, unselfconscious and present, and absent

as a god, the man who could almost be me,

who I do my best to rush toward. I pray that

one day, by His grace, we may meet.

 

                                                                  Image by Clarence White

Ark

by Camille T. Dungy 

I will enter you as hope enters me,   

through blinding liquid, light of rain, and I   

will stay inside until you send me out;   

I will stay inside until you ground me.  

We cannot outrun the rain. So many   

summers I have tried. So many summers.   

But when the rumble calls after the spark   

there can be no escape.   No outstripping   

the drench soak, the wet sheath, the water caul.   

This is more than you want to hear.   Much more   

than I want to tell you. Tabernacle   

transporting my life from the desert, you,   

the faith I am born and reborn into,   

you, rescuer, deliverer of rain.

Under One Small Star

                          by Wislawa Szymborska (born 1923)

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all.
Please, don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second. 

Jurassic Park Theme 

 J.Williams ( Guitar Orchestra)

Beautiful music but why so serious ? Are they enjoying it ?

Opening Stanza from Choruses from "The Rock"
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965),
The Rock (1934)
 

 
The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.

O perpetual revolution of configured stars,

O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,

O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.

 

Marked by Ashes

by Walter Brueggemann

Ruler of the Night, Guarantor of the day . . .

This day — a gift from you.
This day — like none other you have ever given, or we have ever received.

This Wednesday dazzles us with gift and newness and possibility.
This Wednesday burdens us with the tasks of the day, for we are already halfway home :

halfway back to committees and memos,
halfway back to calls and appointments,
halfway on to next Sunday,
halfway back, half frazzled, half expectant,
half turned toward you, half rather not.

This Wednesday is a long way from Ash Wednesday,
but all our Wednesdays are marked by ashes —
we begin this day with that taste of ash in our mouth:
of failed hope and broken promises,
of forgotten children and frightened women,
we ourselves are ashes to ashes, dust to dust;

We can taste our mortality as we roll the ash around on our tongues.

We are able to ponder our ashness with
some confidence, only because our every Wednesday of ashes
anticipates your Easter victory over that dry, flaky taste of death.

On this Wednesday, we submit our ashen way to you —
your Easter parade of newness.
Before the sun sets, take our Wednesday and Easter us,
Easter us to joy and energy and courage and freedom;

Easter us that we may be fearless for your truth.
Come here and Easter our Wednesday with
mercy and justice and peace and generosity.

We pray as we wait for the Risen One who comes soon.