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Updated in Lent 2006 with poems by Alfred Corn, Robert Pinsky, Dante via Seamus Heaney, Rainer Maria
Rilke, William Blake and Jim Brennan.
Call Forth the Poets
I think it is time to call forth the poets.
No culture, nation or people have existed without them. Where are their voices? Why do we as a nation hide
them from our sight? Could their words be too powerful for us? Might their rhythms and dislocated syntax
disrupt our comfortable notions of ourselves? I pray a poet will rise up and stand before the White House, the Congress,
our house and torch our withered preconceptions of war and peace. Jesus was, I think, a poet. The Gospel
of John refers to him as the 'word' of God. There is no word without poetry. Christ the poetic word of God! think
of that. Ponder it to your soul's own advantage.
~ Pastor Bledsoe
I met Alfred Corn by chance while pastoring
in Columbus, Ohio. He is a brilliant poet, a delightful man and he is well worth a read. The dedication or prefatory
page to his book, A Call in the Midst of the Crowd, is entited, "To a Muse." Anyone who has tried to write poetry
will undestand this poetic invocation:
Give us something on the level
Of the times you appeared unsummoned
At corner tables afternoon
Or night there among red and gold
Reflections flashing in spilled draughts.
From all but nothing you develop,
Figures on point and adagio
As for a two-step in the white act.
Sometimes angel, sometimes a man,
You have no theories but music
And what charms if not obsessions,
Ironies, ancient medals, new coins?
The air burns with the trace of where
You spoke--never twice the same spot.
The idea's to strike, then vanish,
Your only object what comes next,
The moment just now beginning.
 The first canto from Dante's Inferno
stopped me in my tracks when, on the cusp of turning 40 years old, I picked up a volume edited by Daniel Halpern in a bookstore.
It was as though an arrow had rivened my chest. This canto is translated from the Latin by Seamus Heaney, the great
Irish poet.
In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself astray in a dark wood
where the straight road had been lost sight of.
How hard it is to say what it was like
in the thick of thickets, in a wood so dense and gnarled
the very thought of it renews my panic.
It is bitter almost as death itself is bitter.
But to rehearse the good it also brought me
I will speak about the other things I saw there.
How I got into it I cannot clearly say
for I was moving like a sleepwalker
the moment I stepped out of the right way,
But when I came to the bottom of a hill
standing off a the far end of that valley
where a great terror had disheartened me
I looked up, and saw how its shoulders glowed
already in the rays of the planet
which leads and keeps men straight on every road.
Then I sensed a quiet influence settling
into those depths in me that had been rocked
and pitifully troubled all night long.
And as a survivor gasping on the sand
turns his head back to study in a daze
the dangerous combers, so my mind
Turned back, although it was reeling forward,
back to inspect a pass that had proved fatal
heretofore to everyone who entered.
I rested a little then, for I was weary,
then began to climb up the waste slopes once more
with my firm foot always the lower one beneath me....
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| by Kirsten Bledsoe (age 10) |
When I picked up Robert Pinsky's
book of poems, The Want Bone, I recall being blown away by the very first poem in that collection. "From the
Childhood of Jesus"
works from a strand of tradition found in Islam
that had the child
taking clay and fashioning birds and
then tossing them
into the air and giving them life.
Here is Pinsky's poem,
full of dread for what is born from a chance
encounter on the Sabbath; it
seems to me a poem that speaks volumes of our
shattered and shared histories:
One Saturday morning he went to the river to play.
He modeled twelve sparrows out of the river clay
And scooped a clear pond, with a dam of twigs and mud.
Around the pond he set the birds he had made,
Evenly as the hours. Jesus was five. He smiled,
As a child would who had made a little world
Of clear still water and clay beside a river.
But a certain Jew came by, a friend of his father,
And he scolded the child and ran at once to Joseph,
Saying, "Come see how your child has profaned the Sabbath,
Making images at the river on the Day of Rest."
So Joseph came tothe place and took his wrist
And told him, "Child, you have offended the Word."
Then Jesus freed the hand that Joseph held
And clapped his hands and shouted to the birds
To go away. They raised their beaks at his words
And breathed and stirred their feathers and flew away.
The people were frightened. Meanwhile, another boy,
The son of Annas the scribe, had idly taken
A branch of driftwood and leaning against it had broken
The dam and muddied the little pond and scattered
the twigs and stones. Then Jesus was angry and shouted,
"Unrighteous, impious, ignorant, what did the water
Do to harm you? Now you are going to wither
The way a tree does, you shall bear no fruit
And no leaves, you shall wither down to the root."
At once the boy was all withered. His parents moaned,
The Jews gasped, Jesus began to leave, then turned
And prophesied, his child's face wet with tears:
"Twelve times twelve times twelve thousands of years
Before these heavens and this earth were made,
The Creator set a jewel in the throne of God
With hell on the left and Heaven to the right,
The Sanctuary in front, and behind, an endless night
Endlessly fleeing Torah written in flame.
And on that jewel in the throne, God wrote my name."
Then Jesus left and went into Joseph's house.
The family of the withered one also left the place,
Carrying him home. The Sabbath was nearly over.
By dusk, the Jews were all gone from the river.
Small creatures came from the undergrowth to drink
And foraged in the shadows along the bank.
Alone in his cot in Joseph's house, the Son
Of Man was crying himself to sleep. The moon
Rose higher, the Jews put out their lights and slept,
And all was calm and as it had been, except
In the agitated household of the scribe Annas,
And high in the dark, where unknown even to Jesus
The twelve new sparrows flew aimlessly through the night,
Not blinking or resting, as if never to alight.
Visit Robert Pinsky's poem project and watch videos of Americans reading their favorite poem.
I'm unsure when I first discovered his poems,
but Rainer Maria Rilke writes with a power and profundity that recalls for me the mystics. He has witnessed something
greater than himself and not just that, but has peered into its gears and mechanisms. From the Sonnets to Orpheus, II,13:
Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were
behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.
Be forever dead in Eurydice--more gladly rise
into the seamless life proclaimed in your song.
Here, in the realm of decline, among momentary days,
be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang.
Be--and yet know the great void where all things begin,
the infinite source of your own most intense vibration,
so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent.
To all that is used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb
creatures in the world's full reserve, the unsayable sums,
joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count.
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| Etching of the Alpha & Omega from bronze podium. |
William Blake is one of my favorite
poets. When I first went to London in 1999,
I visited his grave at the edge of The City
and as well, gazed upon the bust
of him at Westminster Abbey. He was
a burning bush. Here then is one
of my favorite poems by him and as a sidenote,
this poem has been put
to choral music by the contemporay English
(and Orthodox) composer,
John Taverner. The poem, "The Lamb"
:
Little Lamb, who made thee:
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life & bid thee feed
By the stream & o'er the meed;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, wooly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice
making all the vales rejoice?
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee:
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb.
He is meek & he is mild;
He became a little cihld:
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name
Little Lamb, God bless thee.
Little Lamb, God bless thee.
On Easter Sunday of 2003, I met a poet who
was leaving our worship service. His friend revealed to me that he was a poet, visiting from Ireland. I asked
if we might meet some time in my office and hear his poems. Jim Brennan is a bright poet and a carpenter to boot, hailing
from Daingean County, Offaly. Here is a poem I like of his from his collection entitled, After Work.
The poem's title is, "Lost at Sea: For those lost in Fethard-on-Sea" :
Craoio-og
I am at north
By north east
Variable
My thoughts
Are racing through
My young heart
Constantly thinking
Of the south.
I am all at sea
Again
I know where tears begin
They are falling
Out of time and rhyme
Into a stone
Near my shoulder.
This stone is where
My heart should be
With the things
I can't forget.
Lost somewhere
Far away
North by north east
My thoughts
Are towards
The south.
 I'm pretty sure that as we recited some poems, I would
have shared this one with Jim Brennan from the Lenten season just having passed.
Lent 2003
by Michael Bledsoe
betwixt the kyrie and the
doxology
evening sun ascended,
Till the shadows
In one continuous sound
praised Father, Son and Holy
Ghost
and I looked 'round for the
wooden vessel
as the choir of oaks clothed
in wet garments in yonder grove
swayed like smitten worshippers
swooning near the grave
All God's mystery in the rest
are buried,
All God's mystery in long
drooping boughs between
the kyrie and the amen
God's mystery in prayer I
breathe,
only to release that breath
as rivers,
while the Red Swan floating,
flies,
Bigger than the tides that
were come to me
betwixt the table of our Lord
and calumny
I kneel and take my place
there is no god but God
the tracings like metal filings
of suffering and loss
we shall behold and be beheld
until then
a cross.
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