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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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?
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)
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.