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)

© Adonis (‘Aku Ahnad Sa’id) [1930- ],

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)

© Adonis (‘Aku Ahnad Sa’id) [1930- ],

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.

© Lucile Adler

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.

© Howard Nemerov

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.

© Andrew Hudgins, pages 106-107

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."

THE  CROSS: 

CHECK  IT  OUT 

INTRODUCTION

The title of my homily for this feast of Holy Cross is, “The Cross: Check It Out.”

We have this enormous cross here inside St. John Neumann Church, Annapolis, Maryland. I understand there was some controversy when it was planted in this church: some were for it and some were against it. 

The Cross: Check it Out.

Thought: it’s here. Sit under it and see what it does for you. Better: sit under it and listen to what Jesus says to you.

If a sermon is boring – or doesn’t grab you – sit here under the tree of this cross and see what Christ hanging on the cross means to you.

If life is boring – or going wrong for you – drop into this church – or any church and sit under the tree of the cross – and hear Jesus being with you.

SITTING UNDER THE TREE

Does anyone sit under trees anymore?

Does anyone just sit there and meditate – think – lean – grow.

When we were kids we used to go to a great place called, “Bliss Park.”

It had this one big gray barked tree 2/3 up the hill. It was up there on the left as you looked up the hill and just right if you got it for your family on a Sunday afternoon. A blanket or two would be laid on under just under this tree. We would talk. We’d lay down and nap. We kids would roll down the hill in the warm weather. We’d eat neat picnic food. We’d wander to the top of the hill and then walk to this great spot that overlooked the New York Harbor. There was the Statue of Liberty. You could see the skyscrapers of Manhattan – but there was no World Trade Center yet – nor Verrazano Bridge.

When was the last time you sat or laid down under a tree.

Is it true that Isaac Newton sat there under an apple tree and when he saw one fall to the ground he wondered, why didn’t it fall up? “Eureka!” He realized the pull of this body we’re on has a greater pull than all those other bodies out there in space. He realized the reality of the Law of Gravity.

Is it true that the Buddha had had it. He tried the easy path and it got him nowhere. He tried the strict path and that got him nowhere either. So he sat there stubbornly under the Bodhi or Bo Tree till he had an answer. He sat and sat till he was enlightened. Surprise – he was. He came up with the Middle Way – the balanced way of Buddhism. And pilgrims to the major Buddhist shrines in India and Sri Lanka – will find Bodhi or Bo trees - a type of fig tree - to sit under.

When was the last time you sat or laid down under a tree?

In the 70’s I went to a Conference at the Cardinal Spellman Retreat House in Riverdale, New York, right on the Hudson River. It was given by the smartest and most read person I ever met: Tom Berry. 

Talk about long sermons. It took him years and years  of study to put his material together. Then it took him a whole weekend to present: “A New Creation Account.” It brought in all kinds of creation accounts from way, way back – as well as history, discoveries, as well as all the science up to the present day. I don’t know enough anthropology and physics and inner and outer space stuff, but I sat there amazed.

A priest whom I went with to this conference said, “Andy you’ll understand about 1% of what he’s talking about."

He was right. 

However, what I remember was Tom Berry’s opening comment.

Looking out through the clear glass sliding doors that were the wall on one side of the big conference room was a big grass lawn. If one looked further down the hill, one saw the Hudson River. 

Pausing --- standing there at the speaker’s podium – Tom Berry said, “There’s a big old oak tree at the bottom of that green lawn there. It’s been there for hundreds of years. If we all went down there and sat silently under that tree for this weekend – we’d get a lot more enlightened than we’d get sitting up here and talking.”

I saw in The New York Times years later that – that old tree died. 

And Tom Berry died as well June 1, 2009. 

He was called a geologian.

It’s not by accident that the Old Creation story in the Book of Genesis begins by talking about two trees: the tree of life in the middle of the garden and the tree of good and evil as well.

Take and eat from the tree of life. Don’t take. Don’t eat of the tree of good and evil.

It’s not by accident that the New Creation account by Jesus has the tree of the cross. It’s the tree of life and it’s the tree of good and evil.

 TODAY’S FEAST

To understand today’s feast of the Holy Cross it’s important to pull these stories together. To understand the Cross read today’s readings again. To understand the Cross sit under it.

Sit under the cross and look up and see Jesus – and what humans did to him – cursing – spitting and crucifying him – after dragging and pushing him up that hill to die.

Under that cross were men yelling at him and throwing dice to gets his robe.

Under that cross were Mary, a few other women and John his beloved disciple.

Under that Cross we can look up at Jesus and get enlightenment. Answer evil with goodness and love. Put all in the Father’s hands – because all of life is out of our hands. Turn over and over again when others hurt us and are evil towards us – Jesus central message of love: Father forgive them because they don’t know what to do.

Under that cross we can hear today’s first reading – that the crowd was being bit by snakes – and so Moses grabbed a snake – nailed it to a pole and said, “This is what’s killing you – stay clear of them biting and poisoning you.”

That symbol became the symbol of the medical profession. Stay clear of this and this and this – all those things that are poisoning you.

That symbol became the symbol of Christians – stay clear of all those things that are killing you. Nail to the cross anger, yelling, envy, pride, and then hear from the cross: this is what’s killing you.

Under the cross you’ll get today’s second reading – that this is God – in the ultimate emptying of his Godness – to tell us how much God became us – to bring us to God. We weren’t getting that – so he suffered the ultimate emptiness dying on the cross.

Under the cross we’ll get the message of today’s gospel – that Jesus so loved the world that he died for us – that God so loved the world that he sent his son to us – that we might be saved.

CONCLUSION

How to conclude this?

Hope this is not slick or too cute.

The title of my homily is not: The Cross: don’t chuck it out.

The title or my homily is: The Cross: Check It Out.

THE CROSS 

FROM ANOTHER VIEWPOINT 

Poem for Today - September 14, 2014

CHRIST AFTER CRUCIFIXION

After they took me down I heard the winds

in a long wail skim the palm trees

and the steps fade.

The wounds

and the cross they nailed me to for the whole afternoon

did not kill me, though. And I listened: the wailing

travelled across the field between me and the city

like the rope that pulls on the ship

while it sinks to the depths. The lamentation was

like a string of light between the morning

 and the darkness in the bleak winter sky.

And then the city drowsed upon its affairs.

When mulberry and orange trees bloom,

When the village of Jaykur extends to the limits of the imagination—

when it flourishes with grass, its fragrance sings

and the suns suckle it with their light.

When even the darkness of the night turns green

the warmth touches my heart, and my blood runs in its soil.

My heart is a sun when the sun throbs light;

my heart is the earth, brings forth wheat and flowers and pure water;

My heart is the water, my heart is a stalk of wheat,

its death is resurrection: it lives in him who eats of it

in the dough which is shaped into loaves

and swells like a small breast, like the breast of life.

I died by fire: I burnt the darkness of my clay,

but the god was untouched.

I was a beginning: and in the beginning were the poor.

I died that the bread might be eaten in my name,

that they might plant me in season.

How many lives will I live? In every pit

I have grown into a future, a seed,

a generation, in every heart that has

a drop, or droplet of my blood.

When I returned and Judas saw me

his secret—he turned yellow.

He was darkened by me like a shadow, the statue of a dispirited idea

that would, he feared, reveal death in the moisture of his eyes ...

(His eyes are of rock;

with them he covers his grave from the people)

Afraid of its warmth, of never realizing it, he had told all.

`—You! or has my shadow blanched, been scattered with light?

You proceed from the world of death, but death comes once!

So said our fathers, so they taught us; can it be false?'

This he thought when he saw me, and this his glance said.

A running step, steps.

The grave will collapse under these steps.

Have they come? Who but they?

A step—another.

I place the rock on my chest.

Didn't they crucify me yesterday? Here I am in my grave.

Let them come; I am in my grave. Who knows

that I am ... who knows?

And Judas' friends, who will believe what they claim?

A step ... a step.

Here I am now naked in my dark grave.

Yesterday I was furled like doubt, like a bud;

the flowers of blood dripped under my snowy shrouds.

I was like the shadow between night and day

until I exploded my very being in a shower of treasures,

stripped it like fruits.

When I cut my pocket into swaddling clothes,

and my sleeve into a blanket

when I warmed the bones of the children one day with my flesh—

when I undressed my own wound to bandage the wounds of others,

the wall fell between God and myself.

The soldiers surprised even my wounds and the throbs of my heart:

surprised all that was not death, though in a cemetery.

They surprised me as a fruitful palm tree is surprised

by a flock of hungry birds in a deserted village.

The eyes of guns block my path.

Levelled, they plot with their fire my crucifixion—

with iron and fire: but the light of the skies,

remembrance and love are the eyes of my people.

They carry the burden for me, bedew my cross, so that how small

is that death—my death—and how big!

After they nailed me, and I turned my eyes to the city

I could barely distinguish field, wall, or cemetery.

Like aa flourishing forest, there extended

As far as the eye could see, in every domain a cross  and a sad mother

At the childbirth of the city!

[Summer 1957]

Badr Shakin al-Sayyab (1926-1964)

Pages 140-143 - in

When the Words Burn,

An Anthology of Modern

Arabic Poetry: 1945-1987,

translated by John Mikhail Asfour