Category Archives: Advent

Advent Again – day 12

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not slow, but making space for all to change…

movement-in-kind-by-matthew-whitney

“Movement in Kind” by Matthew Whitney

from “A Change of Maps” by Carolyne Wright

 

…

Above us, satellites measure the drift

of continents, dissolving vows

of bedrock, offshore shelves conceding

 

all their striations to the sea.

They track the moon’s loosening orbit,

explorer shuttle homing in

with batteries of data, micro-

 

chips shrinking our wildest dreams.

We roll up the old cartographies

coordinates overlaid with newer,

more transparent certainties

 

in the subatomic shadows’ glare.

Where now? we want to know of landscape –

houses and poplars and children the maps

and master planners have no idea of.

 

Our arrival will coincide with the true

colors of our going. We look

both ways for distances that shift

their bearings in our favor.

 

 

Advent Again – day 11

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“out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks”

 

hirotoshi-ito_stone_sculpture

stone sculpture by Hirotoshi Ito

from “The Words Under the Words” by Naomi Shihab Nye

My grandmother’s eyes say Allah is everywhere, even in death.
When she talks of the orchard and the new olive press,
when she tells the stories of Joha and his foolish wisdoms,
He is her first thought, what she really thinks of is His name.
“Answer, if you hear the words under the words—
otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges,
difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones.”

 

 

Advent Again – day 10

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“so that all may see and know…”

 

[Psalm #5] from 99 Psalms by SAID, translated from the German by Mark S Burrows

(Brewster, Mass.: Paraclete Press, 2013)

 

lord

let me be a water puddle

that mirrors your heavens

and murmurs your prayers

so that the cicadas might understand me

puddlemcescher

“Puddle” by M.C. Escher

show yourself o lord

even if you have no other choice

than to come in the fierce coursing of blood

and take in the refugees

because every fleeing ends in your eye

even if those who flee forget you in their time of need

because only those who doubt in you

seek you

 

Advent Again – day 9

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“aspire to live quietly”

from “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

night-of-the-poor

“Noche de los pobres” by Diego Rivera

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it

….

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

….

Advent Again – day 8

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“a branch shall grow…”

the-tree-of-life

“The Tree of Life” by Gustav Kimt

“Tree” by Jane Hirschfield

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books—

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

Advent Again – day 7

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“What shall I cry?”

 

from “Advice to a Prophet” by Richard Wilbur

 

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,

Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,

Not proclaiming our fall but begging us

In God’s name to have self-pity,

 

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,

The long numbers that rocket the mind;

Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,

Unable to fear what is too strange.

 

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.

How should we dream of this place without us?—

The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,

A stone look on the stone’s face?

 

Speak of the world’s own change. Though we cannot conceive

Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost

How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,

How the view alters….

cityscape-by-jeremy-mann

Painting by Jeremy Mann

Advent Again – day 6

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“Is this the time…?”

 

from “A Letter from Li Po, part XII” by Conrad Aiken

13bamboo_qingfengyayun-under-moon_2002

“Light Wind and Bright Moonlight” by Maolin Zhang (2002)

The hour is open as the mind is open.

Closed as the mind is closed. Opens as the hand opens

to receive the ghostly snowflakes of the moon, closes

to feel the sunbeams of the bloodstream warm

our human inheritance of touch. The air tonight

brings back, to the all-remembering world, its ghosts,

borne from the Great Year on the Wind Wheel Circle.

On that invisible wave we lift, we too,

and drag at secret moorings,

stirred by the ancient currents that gave us birth.

And they are here, Li Po and all the others,

our fathers and our mothers: the dead leaf’s footstep

touches the grass: those who were lost at sea

and those the innocents the too-soon dead:

all mankind

and all it ever knew is here in-gathered,

held in our hands, and in the wind

breathed by the pines on Sheepfold Hill.

How still the Quaker Graveyard, the Meeting House

how still, where Cousin Abiel, on a night like this,

now long since dead, but then how young,

how young, scuffing among the dead leaves after frost

looked up and saw the Wine Star, listened and heard

borne from all quarters the Wind Wheel Circle word:

the father within him, the mother within him, the self

coming to self through love of each for each.

Advent Again – day 5

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Choose the better part…

(c) The Fleming Collection; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

“Glasgow Tenement” by David Ross Warrilow

“Listen. Put on morning.” by W. S. Graham

Listen. Put on morning.
Waken into falling light.
A man’s imagining
Suddenly may inherit
The handclapping centuries
Of his one minute on earth.
And hear the virgin juries
Talk with his own breath
To the corner boys of his street.
And hear the Black Maria
Searching the town at night.
And hear the playropes caa
The sister Mary in.
And hear Willie and Davie
Among bracken of Narnain
Sing in a mist heavy
With myrtle and listeners.
And hear the higher town
Weep a petition of fears
At the poorhouse close upon
The public heartbeat.
And hear the children tig
And run with my own feet
Into the netting drag
Of a suiciding principle.
Listen. Put on lightbreak.
Waken into miracle.
The audience lies awake
Under the tenements
Under the sugar docks
Under the printed moments.
The centuries turn their locks
And open under the hill
Their inherited books and doors
All gathered to distil
Like happy berry pickers
One voice to talk to us.
Yes listen. It carries away
The second and the years
Till the heart’s in a jacket of snow
And the head’s in a helmet white
And the song sleeps to be wakened
By the morning ear bright.
Listen. Put on morning.
Waken into falling light.

Advent Again – day 4

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“The word is very near to you…”

near-and-far

“Near and Far” by Jamie Heiden

“Nothing is Far” by Robert Francis

Though I have never caught the word
Of God from any calling bird,
I hear all that the ancients heard.
Though I have seen no deity
Enter or leave a twilit tree,
I see all that the seers see.
A common stone can still reveal
Something not stone, not seen, yet real.
What may a common stone conceal?
Nothing is far that once was near.
Nothing is hid that once was clear.
Nothing was God that is not here.
Here is the bird, the tree, the stone.
Here in the sun I sit alone
Between the known and the unknown.

Advent Again – Day 3

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What are you waiting for?

from “I Am Waiting” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

…

I am waiting for the Great Divide to be crossed

and I am anxiously waiting

for the secret of eternal life to be discovered

by an obscure general practitioner

and I am waiting

for the storms of life

to be over

and I am waiting

to set sail for happiness

and I am waiting

for a reconstructed Mayflower

to reach America

with its picture story and tv rights

sold in advance to the natives

and I am waiting

for the lost music to sound again

in the Lost Continent

in a new rebirth of wonder

 

I am waiting for the day

that maketh all things clear

and I am awaiting retribution

for what America did

to Tom Sawyer

and I am waiting

for Alice in Wonderland

to retransmit to me

her total dream of innocence

and I am waiting

for Childe Roland to come

to the final darkest tower

and I am waiting

for Aphrodite

to grow live arms

at a final disarmament conference

in a new rebirth of wonder

 

I am waiting

to get some intimations

of immortality

by recollecting my early childhood

and I am waiting

for the green mornings to come again

youth’s dumb green fields come back again

and I am waiting

for some strains of unpremeditated art

to shake my typewriter

magritte-la-clairvoyance

“La Clairvoyance” by René Magritte

 

and I am waiting to write

the great indelible poem

and I am waiting

for the last long careless rapture

and I am perpetually waiting

for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn

to catch each other up at last

and embrace

and I am awaiting

perpetually and forever

a renaissance of wonder