Reflections By The Bay

Monday, September 15, 2014

MARY ON

A USUAL DAY

Poem for Today - Sunday - September 28, 2014

FROM A WOMAN’S LIFE

What Mary knew was just

enough for the usual day;

pull water, flint fire, bake

bread, smile, pray

the dark orations, sleep, wake

wait. When pain honed a nerve,

when birth or dying clotted

an hour, she leaned to the curve

of living, resilient to fear

laughter suffering.

Partings are a little death.
Each one’s journey is a thing.

Wholly without precedent.
She looked at the sky

For compass. None. She, too,

Created a road to travel by.

© Maura Eichner
in Upholding Mystery
An Anthology
of Contemporary
Christian Poetry,
edited by
David Impastato,
Oxford University
Press, Oxford,
New York, 1997,

Pages 362-363

PRESENT ____ ABSENT ____

PLEASE CHECK ONE

Poem for Today - Saturday - September 27, 2014

FLICKERING MIND

Lord, not you,

it is I who am absent.
At first

belief was a joy I kept in secret,

stealing alone

into sacred places;

a quick glance, and away – and back,

circling.

I have long since uttered your name

but now

I elude your presence.

I stop to think about you, and my mind

at once

like a minnow darts away,

darts

into the shadows, into gleams that fret

unceasing over

the river's purling and passing.

Not for one second

will my self hold still, but wanders

anywhere,

everywhere it can turn. Not you,

it is I am absent.

You are the stream, the fish, the light,

the pulsing shadow,

you the unchanging presence, in whom all

moves and changes.

How can I focus my flickering, perceive

at the fountain's heart

the sapphire I know is there?

in Upholding Mystery,

An Anthology of Contemporary

Christian Poetry, Edited by

David Impastato,

Oxford University Press,

New York, Oxford, 1997

JUST LOOKING,

JUST WATCHING

Poem for Today - Friday - September 26, 2014

BACK PORCH FUNDAMENTALIST

In the afternoon

he chose the corner in the sun.

Then he set his porch rocker

facing the mimosa

where gold wires

of light tapped

the leaves, and he, himself,

by a simple act of seeing

observed a miracle.

If anything is, he said,

them pods

on this tree is the keys

of the kingdom.

in Upholding Mystery,

An Anthology of Contemporary

Christian Poetry, Edited by

David Impastato,

Oxford University Press,

New York, Oxford, 1997

THE WIND BLOWS

WHERE IT WILLS -

EVEN INTO AN EGGPLANT

Poem for Today - Thursday - September 25, 2014

PENTECOST

What is this Holy Spirit?

And what is it doing in the eggplant?

page 116 in Upholding Mystery,

An Anthology of Contemporary

Christian Poetry, Edited by

David Impastato,

Oxford University Press,

New York, Oxford, 1997

ANGER:

THE FIRE COMING FROM AN ANGRY HEART

Poem for Today - Wednesday - September 24, 2014

TO THE READER

Black tulips in my heart,

flames on my lips:

from which forest did you come to me,

all you crosses of anger?

I have recognized my griefs

and embraced wandering and hunger.

Anger lives in my hands,

anger lives in my mouth

and in the blood of my arteries swims anger.

O reader,

don't expect whispers from me,

or words of ecstasy:

this is my suffering!

A foolish blow in the sand

And another in the clouds.

And is all I am –

Anger, the tinder

Of fire.

(1964)

Mahmud Darwish (1942-2008 )

pages 194-195 in

When the Words Burn,

An Anthology of Modern

Arabic Poetry: 1945-1987,

translated by John Mikhail Asfour

TRYING TO PUT IT

INTO WORDS.......

Poem for Today - Tuesday - September 23, 2014

THE DICTIONARY FOR LOVERS

I've always thought of writing a dictionary for lovers—

my friends, the lovers.

I've always thought of making them happy,

those marvellous people ... thought of

lighting a small lantern

for the lost thousands,

and making my heart

a wheat field for all the hungry.

I 've always considered making my eyelids

a sheet to throw over the weary

and finding out

where the birds of sadness come from

and when the trees of longing bloom.

Considered discovering what fire has burned us

for millions

of years.

I have, without a doubt, been a big fool

calling myself

the official spokesman of lovers.

Can it happen?

Is it possible to hold the sea in a bottle—

imprison jasmine?

Can the flowers of love be compressed

in one book?

I ask mercy from the God of all!

(1981)

Pages 100-101 in

When the Words Burn,

An Anthology of Modern

Arabic Poetry: 1945-1987,

translated by John Mikhail Asfour

SALEM:

TRANSLATION "PEACE"

Poem for Today - Monday - September 22, 2014

JERUSALEM

I cried till there were no more tears,

prayed till the candles melted, knelt till kneeling bored me.

I asked about Muhammad in you, and about Jesus.

Jerusalem, City which smells of prophets,

shortest of roads between the earth and the sky

Jerusalem, lighthouse for ships,

beautiful girlchild with burnt fingers—

Your eyes are sad, City of the virgin,

luscious garden where the prophet passed.

The stones of the streets,

the minarets of the mosques, are sad.

Jerusalem, beauty wraps in black:

Who rings the bells in the Church of the Resurrection

Sunday Mornings? Who carries the toys to the children

Christmas night?

Jerusalem, city of grief,

large tear that roams under the eyelids:

Who repulses

your enemies, O pearl of religions?

Who washes the blood from the stones of the walls?

Who salvages the Bible

Who salvages Christ from his assassins?

Who salvages man?

Jerusalem, my city

Jerusalem, my love

Tomorrow, tomorrow the orange trees will bloom

and the green wheat rejoice,

and eyes and olive trees will laugh.

Migrating doves shall return

to the blessed rooftops

and children will come back to play.

Fathers and sons will meet

on your tall hills, my country,

country of peace and olive trees.

(1968)

page 100 in When

the Words Burn,

An Anthology of

Modern Arabic Poetry: 1945-1987,

translated by John Mikhail Asfour

GOD’S WAYS

ARE NOT MY WAYS

INTRODUCTION

The title of my thoughts for today is: God’s Ways Are Not My Ways.

The heart of prayer is for the human being to shut up and listen to the heart of God. It’s as simple as that. And in prayer, we find out what Isaiah found out in prayer. I am not God. God is other and God has ideas and thoughts and loves of his own and they are not the way I think and feel and love and see. In prayer Isaiah heard these words,

“My thoughts are not your thoughts,

nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
As high as the heavens are above the earth,

so high are my ways above your ways

and my thoughts above your thoughts.”

This morning I’d like to reflect briefly on that reality: “God’s Ways Are Not My Ways.”

Or shut up and discover you’re not God.

TODAY’S GOSPEL

Today’s gospel gives a concrete example of what Isaiah heard in the principle that God’s Ways Are Not My Ways. It’s the Parable of the Generous Vineyard Owner.

George McCauley said, “If Jesus got killed for any single teaching, the teaching in today’s gospel might have been the one.”

Doesn’t God have the right to do what God wants to do? We cry for that gift for ourselves, yet we often don’t want or don’t allow God to be God. We want God to fit into our image and likeness. Isn’t that a horrible form of idolatry? And of course, God laughs at us and his laugh can be heard in the halls of prayer.

Don’t we get angry when others peg us, when others try to mold us, when others try to shackle us, when others try to force us to do what they want us to do, when others want us to be what they want us to be, when they want us to be in their image and likeness?

Doesn’t every man and woman grow up fighting their parents dictum: “My will be done.”

The boy whose father is an admiral doesn’t want to go to Annapolis. The boy whose father is a surgeon doesn’t want to go to med school. The daughter whose mother was an Olympic diver or gymnast, doesn’t want to spend hours and hours on becoming an athlete.

We want to choose our own salad dressing, our own college, our own hair style, underarm deodorant, our own future and our own friends.

THE OTHER IS FREE

One of the great learnings in life then is not only allowing another person to be free, but that the other person is free: free to choose, free to do what they want to do.

Yet people spend millions of dollars for cosmetics, cars, clothes, dinner engagements, health spas, weight loss to get another to like and love them.

Yet people spend millions of pounds of psychic energy planning and trying to get others to love them.

Yet people spend millions of units of time on phones, writing letters, visiting others, to get them to love them.

And the crash comes when we discover that love is free. If another loves us because of looks, cars, clothes, age, money, etc. all that can crumbles in an earthquake. Relationships need to be built on love that is free. Those are the best relationships. Those are the kind of relationships that stand in the test of time.

GOD

So too with God. God is free to love as God wants to love. God chooses. And all this is mystery and it causes anger and frustration. Yet look around. Go to class reunions. Look at who married whom. You'd be surprised. Some people settle in Scranton and some settle in Seattle or Sacramento. Life is funny. Choices are funny.

Can’t we allow God a sense of humor. Can’t we allow God to choose his friends. Can’t we allow God to do life as God wants to do life - to give some people more than others.

TODAY’S GOSPEL

So once more, once again, we come back to today’s gospel. We see that God has a sense of humor. God isn’t fair. Love isn’t fair. God has favorites. God plays favorites. God is free to do what God wants to as God. If God wants to make penguins and hippopotamus’, monkeys and octopus’, then God can make all of the above and all of the below - funny birds of the sky, fascinating fish of the sea and those who walk or run or slide along the surface of the globe.

US AGAIN

We want that freedom for ourselves, let’s let God have the same.

The heart of prayer then is letting go and letting God - letting God be God. The heart of love is being loved not because of anything we do, but because the other chooses to love us.

And that’s the shock of love: to find out that we are loved by another - and we had nothing to do with it.

CONCLUSION

And the greatest shock is that we are loved by God, not by any thing we do, but because God simply loves us. Sit in prayer and you’ll begin to hear the sounds of love: God’s love for you and maybe God’s love for the other person as well as that crazy guy you read about in the morning paper.

AH SWEET MYSTERY

OF LIFE .... I STILL

CAN'T FIND YOU

Poem for Today - Sunday - September 21, 2014

THE GAME

When the travelling planes pass at great altitudes

over distant villages

the children halt their play

and raise small hands over their eyes

to view the beautiful travelling toy

and as soon as it disappears behind some scattered clouds

they rush along in full force

after a torn ball

and repeat short songs

but no one knows

where their lyrics come from.

(1978)

in When the Words Burn,

An Anthology of

Modern Arabic Poetry: 1945-1987,

translated by John Mikhail Asfour

Page 129

BE OF HATE

A LITTLE MORE CAREFUL

THAN ANYTHING

Poem for Today - Saturday - September 20, 2014

WHEN I KILLED MY LOVE

I hated you, till there was nothing

but my terrible hate to converse with.

Into it I poured tomorrow's blood

and drowned my present.

I fed it the fire of curses, revolution and revenge,

inflicted my cries of hatred upon it in my dark song,

sustained it with the sleep of the dead

and drew a curtain of ghosts and gloom around it.

I despised your name,

its shadows and echoes.

I loathed its colour and tune,

rhythm and form

and the rough memories

which fell, were consumed

and dwelt in eternity all in a moment:

and I was resurrected as a new poem

which says that the past is only a word.

Victory was mine as you fell,

a statue over a cliff.

I came to bury the pieces under the grief of the cypress.

Hungrily my spade split the earth,

and touched

a cold and frightful foot.

I proudly dragged to the light

—Whose corpse? the remains of regret ...

The night was a mirror where I beheld my hatred

and my dead past, but not the centre of my being.

I knew then,

having killed you in my cup and night

and borne my murdered slowly to the grave—

knew, by the lugubrious hue of my face

that I had only killed myself.

(May 12,1952)

pages 78-79 in When

the Words Burn,

An Anthology of

Modern Arabic Poetry: 1945-1987,

translated by John Mikhail Asfour

SOMETIMES SECRETS

ONLY COME

AFTER THE FALL

Poem for Today - Friday - September 19, 2014

THE FALL

I live between the fire and the plague

with my language—with this mute universe.

I live in the apple garden and the sky,

in the first joy and the first despair,

in Eve's arms

a master of those cursed trees,

a master of the fruits,

I live between the clouds and lightning

in a growing stone, in a book

that teaches the secrets and the fall.

(1961)

pages 161-162, in

When the Words Burn,

An Anthology of

Modern Arabic Poetry: 1945-1987,

translated by John Mikhail Asfour

EVERYONE TAKES THEIR TURN

AT BEING NOAH

Poem for Today - Thursday - September 18, 2014

THE NEW NOAH

We travel in the ark with our God-promised oars,

alive under the rain

and mud, while others die.

We travel with the waves, and the dead

are strung across the horizon; we link our lives

to theirs. Between us

and the sky is a window to pray from:

`O God, why did you save us alone

of all people and creatures?

Where will you send us—to your other land?

To our own country

and the leaves of death, the wind of life?

O God, in our veins we fear the sun,

we despair of the light; we dread a tomorrow

where life must be started all over again.'

We travel in the ark with our God-promised oars,

and under the rain

mud embraces the eyes of others.

In mud they have perished, while we are saved

from the deluge: the seeds remaining

in this bowl that turns, or does not turn.

`Had we never become the seed

of creation, for the earth and its generations—

had we never been dust

or cinders, but remained in some limbo

we would never have had to see the world, its hell

and its God, twice.

O God, put us to death with all the other creatures.

We long to be what we are not, long to be

dust. Do not give us life!'

If time rolls back to the beginning

and water immerses the face of life again,

if the universe trembles and God hastens to ask me:

'Noah, save the living!' I will not heed His words.

I will come in my ark with a poet

and a free rebel;

we shall travel together

careless of God's words.

We will open our hearts to the flood,

dive in the mud and strip pebbles

and clay from the eyes of the floating;

we will whisper in their veins that

we have made the ascent,

emerged from the cave,

and changed the course of time.

We have not bent our sails to fear

or listened to God's words.

Death is our rendezvous, and our shores

a familiar despair; we have accepted

its icy sea, its new waters;

we have crossed and reached its end.

Heedless of that God,

we long for a new one.

(Spring 1958)

pages 160-161, in

When the Words Burn,

An Anthology of

Modern Arabic Poetry: 1945-1987,

translated by John Mikhail Asfour

Painting on top by J. M. W. Turner,
We saw this at the Tate Museum in
London - just two weeks ago
at a special exhibition
entitled, "The EY Exhibition,
Late Turner, Painting Set Free".
The title of this painting is,
Light and Colour (Goethe's Theory) –
The Morning after the Deluge –
Moses Writing the Book of Genesis -
exhibited in 1843 for the first time.

TWOGETHER

Poem for Today - Wednesday - September 17, 2014

THE TRAVELLING OUT

I wonder, since we are both travelling out,

If we may go together? Thank you.

You may be sure you will be alone

And private as though I were no one.

God knows, I do not wish to increase your burden.

Naturally, these airports, blinding cities,

And foundry lights confuse you, make you

More solitary than the sight of one lost lamp

Across a bare land promising life there—

Someone over that field alone and perhaps

Waiting for you. That used to be the way.

Feel perfectly free to choose how

You will be alone, since we are going together.

Of course, I never move, I merely hold you

In my mind like a prayer. You are my way

Of praying, and I have chosen you out of hordes

Of travellers to speak to silently, on my own.

I will be with you, with your baffled anger

Among fuming cities, with your grief

At having lost dark fields and lamplight.

It is my way of moving, or praying

Oh, not to give you someone like me,

That's all over, impossible, I go nowhere;

And besides, nothing is given, absolutely

Nothing and no one, only white sermons among

The white of a billion bulbs. No,

Sitting here behind my shutters at twilight,

I am stretching over the blazing lanes,

The dazed crowds jostled and razed

By light, only to join your mind and guide you

Gently, leading you, not, alas, to my own lamp

Across the fields of the world, or to a cozy last

Prayer of lamplight blessing the fields of the air,

But out into hordes of stars that move away

As we move, and for which you’re travelling

Prepares you to go out a little more boldly,

All alone as I am alone.

The New Yorker Book of Poems,

pages 741 - 742

PUT IT

IN WRITING

Poem for Today - Tuesday - September 16, 2014

WRITING

The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters,

these by themselves delight, even without

a meaning, in a foreign language, in

Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve

all day across the lake scoring their white

records in ice. Being intelligible,

these winding ways with their audacities

and delicate hesitations, they become

miraculous, so intimately—out there

at the pen's point or brush's tip - do world

and spirit wed. The small bones of the wrist

balance against great skeletons of stars

exactly; the blind bat surveys his way

by echo alone. Still, the point of style

is character. The universe induces

a different tremor in every hand, from the

check forger's to that of the Emperor

Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy

the "Slender Gold." A nervous man

writes nervously of a nervous world, and so on.

Miraculous. It is as though the world

were a great writing. Having said so much,

let us allow there is more to the world

than writing; continental faults are not

bare convoluted fissures in the brain.

Not only must the skaters soon go home;

also the hard inscription of their skates

is scored across the open water, which long

remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake.

The New Yorker Book of Poems,

pages 816-817

THE ANNUNCIATION

Poem for Today - Monday - September 15, 2014

THE CESTELLO ANNUNCIATION

The angel has already said, Be not afraid.
He’s said, The power of the Most High

will darken you. Her eyes are downcast and half closed.

And there is a long pause – a pause here and forever –

as the angel crowds her. She backs away,

her left side pressed against the picture frame.

He kneels. He's come in all unearthly innocence

to tell her of glory—not knowing, not remembering

how terrible it is. And Botticelli

gives her eternity to turn, look out the doorway, where

on a far hill floats a castle, and halfway across

the river toward it juts a bridge, not completed

and neither is the touch, angel to virgin,

both her hands held up, both elegant, one raised

as if to say stop, while the other hand, the right one,

reaches toward his; and, as it does, it parts her blue robe

and reveals the concealed red of her inner garment

to the red tiles of the floor and the red folds

of the angel's robe. But her whole body pulls away.

Only her head, already haloed, bows,

acquiescing. And though she will, she's not yet said,

Behold, I am the handmaid of the lord,

as Botticelli, in his great pity,

lets her refuse, accept, refuse, and think again.

in Upholding Mystery,

An Anthology of Contemporary

Christian Poetry, Edited by

David Impastato,

Oxford University Press,

New York, Oxford, 1997

Painting by Sandro Botticelli

Notes from Google:

The Annunciation, also known as the Cestello Annunciation, is a tempera painting by the Italian Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli, circa 1489-1490. It is housed in the Uffizi Gallery of Florence.

The picture was commissioned in 1489 by the church of the Florentine convent of Cestello which is now known as Santa Maria Maddalena de'Pazzi.

Underneath the painting on its original frame are words in Latin from St. Luke's Gospel 1:35 "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee."

Reflections By The Bay

Monday, September 15, 2014

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