Beauty now begins the final movement

Malcolm Guite:

The Anointing at Bethany

Come close with Mary, Martha, Lazarus  
So close the candles flare with their soft breath  
And kindle heart and soul to flame within us  
Lit by these mysteries of life and death.  
For beauty now begins the final movement  
In quietness and intimate encounter  
The alabaster jar of precious ointment  
Is broken open for the world’s true lover,  

The whole room richly fills to feast the senses
With all the yearning such a fragrance brings, 
The heart is mourning but the spirit dances, 
Here at the very centre of all things, 
Here at the meeting place of love and loss 
We all foresee, and see beyond the cross.

John Graves’ Small Swift Birds

In recent decades it has become customary, and right, I guess, and easy enough with hindsight, to damn the ancestral frame of mind that ravaged the world so fully and so soon.

What I myself seem to damn mainly though, is just not having seen it. Without any virtuous hindsight I would likely have helped in the ravaging, as did even most of those who loved it best.

But God! To have viewed it entire, the soul and guts of what we had; and gone forever now, except in books and such poignant remnants as small swift birds that journey to and from the distant Argentine, and call at night in the sky.

Poetry Unbound with Pádraig Ó Tuama

Often, a highlight of my week is a new (to me) poem shared by Pádraig Ó Tuama. Today’s, “Neanderthal Dig” by Don McKay, is especially rich.

A Christmas Carol, Sung to the King in the Presence at White-Hall

Robert Herrick:

The darling of the world is come,
And, fit it is, we find a room
To welcome Him. The nobler part
Of all the house here, is the heart …

Merry Christmas!

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.

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.

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

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

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?

Leah Bayans:

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)