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Song of Zechariah In the tender compassion of our God
the dawn from on high will break upon us
To shine on those who dwell in darkness and in the shadow of death,
and to guide our feet into the way of peace. -
As impersonal systems play increasing roles in information-gathering and decision-making, the personal element can be summed up as “human error.” … [T]hen of course the fields concerned with human nature—specifically, all the ways it is not predictable—are unseated, too…
[I]t is simply better to be a human when a personal God is at the heart of the universe. Human lives are easier to defend. Human joys have cosmic significance. Human foibles are “a feature, not a bug.” Human creativity is more arresting. Human language can be savored. Human stories must be told.
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A Treasure Malcolm Guite is posting poems he’s collected in his Advent Anthology, Waiting on the Word. I love to hear Malcolm read (and speak). Today’s offerings, a poem by Robert Hayden, and art by Linda Richardson, are particularly lovely.
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RIP, Kris Kristofferson Well, I woke up Sunday morning With no way to hold my head that didn't hurt And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad So I had one more for dessert Then I fumbled through my closet for my clothes And found my cleanest dirty shirt And I shaved my face and combed my hair And stumbled down the stairs to meet the day I'd smoked my brain the night before On cigarettes and songs that I'd been pickin' But I lit my first and watched a small kid Cussin' at a can that he was kickin' Then I crossed the empty street And caught the Sunday smell of someone fryin' chicken And it took me back to somethin' That I'd lost somehow, somewhere along the way On a Sunday morning sidewalk Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned Cause there's something in a Sunday That makes a body feel alone And there's nothin' short of dyin' Half as lonesome as the sound As a sleepin' city sidewalk Sunday mornin' comin' down In the park, I saw a daddy With a laughing little girl who he was swingin' And I stopped beside a Sunday school And listened to the song that they were singin' Then I headed back for home And somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringin' And it echoed through the canyons Like the disappearing dreams of yesterday On a Sunday morning sidewalk Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned Cause there's something in a Sunday Makes a body feel alone And there's nothin' short of dyin' Half as lonesome as the sound As a sleepin' city sidewalk Sunday mornin' comin' down
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O Liverwurst, Where Art Thou? Sad memorial in the NYT. I loved liverwurst on rye with mustard and red onion slices from the late ’70s Stanford Coffee House. I still wonder why people crossed to the other side of the street after I’d enjoyed one.
At Zabar’s, 1970 - Credit: Michael Gold/Getty Image -
The Finder Found | Edwin Muir
Will you, sometime, who have sought so long, and seek
Still in the slowly darkening searching-ground,
Catch sight some ordinary month or week
Of that rare prize you hardly thought you sought—
The gatherer gathered and the finder found,
The buyer who would buy all himself well bought—
And perch in pride in the buyer’s hand, at home,
And there, the prize, in freedom rest and roam?
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When I first sat with Wendell [Berry] to talk about educating farmers as farmers, he started by turning to the idea of love—in the fullness of the term, not sentimentalized but fully rounded, with the joyful and the difficult joined through membership in a place and with its people.
He then asked a question that I try to answer every day: what works does this love propose?Start with love, then see what works that love proposes. (H/T: @ayjay)
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Good Friday 2024
Jesus, my brother, Jesus, my maker, Today, you paid my bills. What can I do, but fall on my face, And thank you for your grace? Jesus, my Lord.
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A Good Yarn
I’m really enjoying this audiobook of The Odyssey read by the actor, Anton Lesser. The translation by Ian Johnston is very accessible (if a bit awkward at times). I think this story has legs. 📚
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Right Now | Kenneth Fields
It’s nineteen years today since he last held
A drink in his hand or held his breath while smoke
Filled as much of him as he could stand
Till, letting it out, he sought oblivion
Of the trace of memory or anticipation,
And his life fell into a death spiral. Since then
He’s been around folks like him. When he’s been asked,
And sometimes, eager, when he hasn’t been,
He talks to the ones who are not even sure
They want to learn how to stop killing themselves.
That feeling still seems close to him some days.
Right now he’s okay, and that’s enough, right now.RIP, Ken. You were important in my life.
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After an illness, walking the dog | Jane Kenyon
Wet things smell stronger, and I suppose his main regret is that he can sniff just one at a time. In a frenzy of delight he runs way up the sandy road— scored by freshets after five days of rain. Every pebble gleams, every leaf. When I whistle he halts abruptly and steps in a circle, swings his extravagant tail. The he rolls and rubs his muzzle in a particular place, while the drizzle falls without cease, and Queen Anne’s lace and Goldenrod bend low. The top of the logging road stands open and light. Another day, before hunting starts, we’ll see how far it goes, leaving word first at home. The footing is ambiguous. Soaked and muddy, the dog drops, panting, and looks up with what amounts to a grin. It’s so good to be uphill with him, nicely winded, and looking down on the pond. A sound commences in my left ear like the sound of the sea in a shell; a downward, vertiginous drag comes with it. Time to head home. I wait until we’re nearly out to the main road to put him back on the leash, and he —the designated optimist— imagines to the end that he is free.
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Fellowship - Christian Wiman
Tragedy and Christianity are incommensurable, he declared, which we’d have chalked to bluster had he not, within the month, held a son hot from the womb but cold to his kiss, and over a coffin compact as a toolbox wept in the wrecked unreachable way that most resist, and that all of us, where we are most ourselves, turn away from. Bonded and islanded by the silence, we waited there, desperate, with our own pains, to believe, desperate, with our own pains, not to. -
Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry
- Howard NemerovSparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle That while you watched turned to pieces of snow Riding a gradient invisible From silver aslant to random, white, and slow. There came a moment that you couldn’t tell. And then they clearly flew instead of fell.
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from Symmetries & Asymmetries - W.H. Auden
Could any tiger Drink martinis, smoke cigars, And last as we do?
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The Bloody Mary - Susan Donnelly
Sunday in late December calls for one, with a celery stalk and faint taste of Worcestershire, to be sipped while eating poached egg and corned beef hash, in a hotel dining room with someone you love. Touch the hairs at his wrist as the warmth endorses all bed-lingering, non-churchgoing. It's the solstice, remember, when your frugal father would hand around dollar bills so the day would last longer. Stir ice into the rich red and consider such Celtic rituals, as you watch, beyond the tall windows, pilgrims traveling the paths past snow-fringed trees in the park.
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Chores - Maxine Kumin
All day he’s shoveled green pine sawdust out of the trailer truck into the chute. From time to time he’s clambered down to even the pile. Now his hair is frosted with sawdust. Little rivers of sawdust pour out of his boots.
I hope in the afterlife there’s none of this stuff he says, stripping nude in the late September sun while I broom off his jeans, his sweater flocked with granules, his immersed-in-sawdust socks. I hope there’s no bedding, no stalls, no barn
no more repairs to the paddock gate the horses burst through when snow avalanches off the roof. Although the old broodmare, our first foal, is his, horses, he’s fond of saying, make divorces. Fifty years married, he’s safely facetious.
No garden pump that’s airbound, no window a grouse flies into and shatters, no ancient tractor’s intractable problem with carburetor ignition or piston, no mowers and no chain saws that refuse to start, or start, misfire and quit.
But after a Bloody Mary on the terrace already frost-heaved despite our heroic efforts to level the bricks a few years back, he says let’s walk up to the field and catch the sunset and off we go, a couple of aging fools.
I hope, he says, on the other side there’s a lot less work, but just in case I’m bringing tools.
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Christmas Mail - Ted Kooser
Cards in each mailbox, angel, manger, star and lamb, as the rural carrier, driving the snowy roads, hears from her bundles the plaintive bleating of sheep, the shuffle of sandals, the clopping of camels. At stop after stop, she opens the little tin door and places deep in the shadows the shepherds and wise men, the donkeys lank and weary, the cow who chews and muses. And from her Styrofoam cup, white as a star and perched on the dashboard, leading her ever into the distance, there is a hint of hazelnut, and then a touch of myrrh.
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I love John PrineThe moon and stars / hang out in bars / just talkin' -- "Summer's End"
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Welcome, Morning - Anne Sexton
There is joy in all: in the hair I brush each morning, in the Cannon towel, newly washed, that I rub my body with each morning, in the chapel of eggs I cook each morning, in the outcry from the kettle that heats my coffee each morning, in the spoon and the chair that cry “hello there, Anne” each morning, in the godhead of the table that I set my silver, plate, cup upon each morning.
All this is God, right here in my pea-green house each morning and I mean, though often forget, to give thanks, to faint down by the kitchen table in a prayer of rejoicing as the holy birds at the kitchen window peck into their marriage of seeds.
So while I think of it, let me paint a thank-you on my palm for this God, this laughter of the morning, lest it go unspoken.
The Joy that isn’t shared, I’ve heard, dies young.
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Ghosts - Jen Rose Yokel
Quick now, come now to where the veil grows thin, where the border between real and more real—so real we can't bear it—shimmers like ghosts going silently into moonlit mist, to enfolding fog, a cloud of silvered saints hovering over the waters.
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depends
"so much depends upon a green chair beside the brick wall ... "
WCW kind of morning. 📷 -
from "East Coker" | T.S. EliotAnd what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
Trite, perhaps. But true. Often, the “tried and true” is trite. But, so what? The truth is the point.
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Winter After the Stillbirth | Renee Emerson
My husband dreads the winter. Born himself on the darkest day of the year and disregarded, he sees nothing but black ice, danger of pipes bursting, other people’s cats freezing, left outside like a name scratched off the list. But fish still swim beneath the frozen surface of lakes, and there are frogs that let their blood ice over in the mud to thaw again in the spring, green Lazarus come forth.And even I, born on the last day of winter, can see how the snow can cover this all up to look cleaner than it ever was, for a moment at least, while it is still falling in our hair, in our up-turned, hope-filled faces.
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Here we are!I must admit, sometimes I find the daily lectionary to be a chore. Not today.
This, from Baruch (Baruch! - in the Apocrypha), is simply wonderful:
... the stars shone in their watches, and were glad;
he called them, and they said, ‘Here we are!’
They shone with gladness for him who made them.
Baruch 3:34 -
California Hills in August | Dana Gioia
I can imagine someone who found these fields unbearable, who climbed the hillside in the heat, cursing the dust, cracking the brittle weeds underfoot, wishing a few more trees for shade. An Easterner especially, who would scorn the meagerness of summer, the dry twisted shapes of black elm, scrub oak, and chaparral, a landscape August has already drained of green. One who would hurry over the clinging thistle, foxtail, golden poppy, knowing everything was just a weed, unable to conceive that these trees and sparse brown bushes were alive. And hate the bright stillness of the noon without wind, without motion, the only other living thing a hawk, hungry for prey, suspended in the blinding, sunlit blue. And yet how gentle it seems to someone raised in a landscape short of rain – the skyline of a hill broken by no more trees than one can count, the grass, the empty sky, the wish for water.
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