Walt Whitman: The Most Spiritual Poems

I will make the poems of materials, for I think they
    are to be the most spiritual poems,
And I will make the poems
    of my body and of mortality,
For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems
    of my soul and of immmortality.

              --Walt Whitman,
                    from "Starting from Paumanok"

Maurice Manning: A Contemplation of the Celestial World

(Image from The Poetry Foundation)

A Contemplation of the Celestial World

Whoever had the thought to render bear fat
and burn it in a lamp was touched a bit,
or bored, or left alone to ponder light
too long in some dank cabin: bear fat pops
and stinks and brings no cheer to our condition.
My brother Squire would burn such lamps to read
the Scriptures: eyelids smudged, his head immersed
in smoke; his Bible, like a gutted beast,
spread open to Leviticus; his lips:
for prayer. Then I would go outside to muse
upon the many things which need no light,
the chiefest being tears and copulation,
then others, like remembering glad days
or moments which occur without regard
for stars or lamps—my thought: what matters most
is borne of darkness then makes its own pure light.

              --Maurice Manning

Stephen Crane: Black Riders XIII

(Stephen Crane: Nov. 1, 1871-June 5, 1900)

XIII

If there is a witness to my little life,
To my tiny throes and struggles,
He sees a fool;
And it is not fine for gods to menace
       Fools.

   --Stephen Crane, from Black Riders 
                               and Other Lines

Denise Levertov: Passage

(Oct. 24, 1923-Dec. 20, 1997)

Passage

The spirit that walked upon the face of the waters
walks the meadow of long grass;
green shines to silver where the spirit passes.

Wind from the compass points, sun at meridian,
these are forms the spirit enters,
breath, ruach, light that is witness and by which we witness.

The grasses numberless, bowing and rising, silently
cry hosanna as the spirit
moves them and moves burnishing

over and again upon mountain pastures
a day of spring, a needle's eye
space and time are passing through like a swathe of silk.

                                            --Denise Levertov

Shakespeare: There is No Vice So Simple

The world is still deceived with ornament.
In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt,
But being seasoned with a gracious voice,
Obscures the show of evil? In religion,
What damned error but some sober brow
Will bless it, and approve it with a text,
Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?
There is no vice so simple but assumes
Some mark of virtue on his outward parts.

 --Bassanio, in William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (3.2.74-82)

It Is Enough

Anna got me thinking about willing, wishing, answering the call in her great post on dVerse Meeting the Bar. I put a few lines together, but nothing seemed to fit the prompt as well as this older poem, slightly reworked. My apologies to the few who may have already read this one. 

It Is Enough

I heard my share

of sermons, serving

time on straight-backed

pews, begrudging each

moment lost

                     to eternity.

My elders sat willingly           

in expectation

of heavenly reward, glad

to leave all worldly affairs,

glad to rest weary bones

if only for a moment.

They meant well.

I see that now, now

that my own bones

need rest, now that

I hope beyond all hope

to be free in the divine.

But we will never

decipher the mystery, try

as we might. Will we?

All we have from him

we already know,

written bold:

do not kill,

do not steal,

do unto others.

We stumble over what

we do not have: the

in-between-the-lines,

shrouded, incomprehensible,

written in sand, faint

markings that lead us

to belief or despair. I believe

it is enough to want

to believe. It is enough.

Maureen Ash: Church Basement

Ted Kooser is not only a great poet, he is also a great judge of poetry. This is one of the finest poems I've read in a while. Copied with permission from ALiP.
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Welcome to American Life in Poetry. For information on permissions and usage, or to download a PDF version of the column, visit www.americanlifeinpoetry.org.
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American Life in Poetry: Column 424

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

It’s a difficult task to accurately imagine one’s self back into childhood. Maybe we can get the physical details right, but it’s very hard to recapture the innocence and wonder. Maureen Ash, who lives in Wisconsin, gets it right in this poem.




Church Basement

The church knelt heavy

above us as we attended Sunday School,

circled by age group and hunkered

on little wood folding chairs

where we gave our nickels, said

our verses, heard the stories, sang

the solid, swinging songs.

It could have been God above

in the pews, His restless love sifting

with dust from the joists. We little

seeds swelled in the stone cellar, bursting

to grow toward the light.

Maybe it was that I liked how, upstairs, outside,

an avid sun stormed down, burning the sharp-

edged shadows back to their buildings, or

how the winter air knifed

after the dreamy basement.

Maybe the day we learned whatever

would have kept me believing

I was just watching light

poke from the high, small window

and tilt to the floor where I could make it

a gold strap on my shoe, wrap

my ankle, embrace

any part of me.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2012 by Maureen Ash. Reprinted by permission of Maureen Ash. Introduction copyright © 2013 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

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American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. There are no costs for reprinting the columns; we do require that you register your publication here and that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration.

Alone

Tonight at dVerse, our hostess, Victoria Slotto, invites us to write something with voice, passion--something about which we are motivated, inspired, excited, or outraged. This one is not really up to those standards, but it is about an event that held deep feeling for me at that time of my childhood. And I think it does ring with my voice, such as it is (that is, I think it's typical of the kind of stuff I usually write!). Come share with us!

Alone

That blazing afternoon

when I chased an ill-thrown ball

into the front yard, and saw

your shoes beside our car’s

open door, your upturned

purse, and you were nowhere,

and what can you expect

from a boy weaned on

Armageddon and the Imminent

Return of Almighty Christ?

In the twinkling of an eye,

we were told, and the blood

rushed to my hair-tips, and I looked

for you, would not be comforted.

And later, you came home and told us

how you saw little Randy

running across the street, careless,

and the black low-slung sports car

screeching, flinging him into the air,

and before he came tumbling down

you had dropped your purse, run out

of your shoes, and he would be

all right, just a few broken bones,

but I thought you were gone

to be with Jesus, one taken

and the other one left,

and never again have I felt

so alone.

Two Lines from Wiman's "One Time"

(Image credit: http://www.canyondechelly.net/)

To believe is to believe you have been torn
from the abyss, yet stand waveringly on its rim.

                                              --Christian Wiman, "One Time" from Every Riven Thing

Hawthorne on Theological Books

No poetry from me this week due to a ton of overtime work. But here's a nice quote from Hawthorne's "The Old Manse":

So long as an unlettered soul can attain to saving grace, there would seem to be no deadly error in holding theological libraries to be accumulations of, for the most part, stupendous impertinence.

I agree. Even though I own a pretty sizable theological library.

Frisbees and Pinwheels

For Three Word Wednesday, prompt words dangle, abnormal, lavish. Also submitted to dVerse OpenLinkNight. 

Arp 188 and the Tadpole's Tail 
Image Credit: Hubble Legacy Archive, ESA, NASA; Processing - Bill Snyder (Heavens Mirror Observatory)

Frisbees & Pinwheels

After all, what does it matter, this troubled

hour, when whole worlds dangle overhead,

prodded into existence by who knows

what evasive Power? I’ve seen a picture

of the Tadpole Galaxy, so called for its

abnormal gaseous tail stretched out

280 thousand light years,

caused by some celestial near miss.

In the background other spiral galaxies

are scattered lavishly about. Some lay

flat, like frisbees flung over the roof, sent

flying just to see where they might land;

others stand on edge, like sparkling pinwheels

we used to clench in our plump childish hands,

running. What if God is but a laughing child

spinning pinwheels?

A Prayer Before the End

Knowledgeable poet Gay Reiser Cannon, host of tonight's FormForAll at dVerse, has invited us to try our hand at writing a quatern. Both rhyme and meter play a role in this form--I kept pretty close to exactness, but there are a few slight metrical replacements along the way. This was super fun--it's amazing how much can be learned by adhering to a form. Anyway, in the spirit of the end of the world predicted for this month . . . 

A Prayer Before the End

All former things will pass away—

A ball of flame; forgetfulness.

At any rate, the wise seers say

A bang or whimper ends it all.

Some dream of walking golden streets

When former things will pass away,

No loss or pain will enter there

And night will fade to lasting day.

If I may ask for a delay

There’re things I’d like to do before

All former things will pass away.

I want to plant my spring garden,

Enjoy a walk beside the creek,

And watch the kids go out to play.

I’ll turn the lights out when I leave

When former things will pass away.

Fr. Sophrony: Two Stages to Victory Over Hell

There are two stages to victory over hell. The first is the mastery of the blackness within us ourselves; the second, compassionate love, natural to Divinity, for all creation.
--Fr. Sophrony of Essex

Immortal by Beauty

(Sunrise, Daufuskie Island)

June 8, 1838. Why do we seek this lurking beauty, in skies, in poems, in drawings? Ah because there we are safe, there we neither sicken nor die. I think we fly to Beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature. We are made immortal by this kiss, by the contemplation of beauty. 

--Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Journals

Loss of Sacramental Thinking

Man knows how to use machines but not how to use the world; he earns his bread by technology, not by his art. This is why it is impossible for bread and wine to represent for urban man the summing up of life, the life and work of a whole year with four seasons, a year of sowing and harvest, subject to weather and winds.  

--Christos Yannaras, from The Freedom of Morality

Paradise with the Donkeys

Richard Wilbur, a great poet in his own right, also has a reputation as an exceptional translator of non-English poetry. What follows is one I enjoy, originally written by French poet Francis Jammes (1868-1938). I cannot read French, so I don’t know if Wilbur improved on the original or not. Either way, this version is very fine.

 (The photograph is of Jammes, n.d.)

A Prayer to Go to Paradise with the Donkeys

            to Máire and Jack

When I must come to you, O my God, I pray

It be some dusty-roaded holiday,

And even as in my travels here below,

I beg to choose by what road I shall go

To Paradise, where the clear stars shine by day.

I’ll take my walking-stick and go my way,

And to my friends the donkeys I shall say,

“I am Francis Jammes, and I’m going to Paradise,

For there is no hell in the land of the loving God.”

And I’ll say to them: “Come, sweet friends of the blue skies,

Poor creatures who with a flap of the ears or a nod

Of the head shake off the buffets, the bees, the flies . . .”

Let me come with these donkeys, Lord, into your land,

These beasts who bow their heads so gently, and stand

With their small feet joined together in a fashion

Utterly gentle, asking your compassion.

I shall arrive, followed by their thousands of ears,

Followed by those with baskets at their flanks,

By those who lug the carts of mountebanks

Or loads of feather-dusters and kitchen-wares,

By those with humps of battered water-cans,

By bottle-shaped she-asses who halt and stumble,

By those tricked out in little pantaloons

To cover their wet, blue galls where flies assemble

In whirling swarms, making a drunken hum.

Dear God, let it be with these donkeys that I come,

And let it be that angels lead us in peace

To leafy streams where cherries tremble in air,

Sleek as the laughing flesh of girls; and there

In that haven of souls let it be that, leaning above

Your divine waters, I shall resemble these donkeys,

Whose humble and sweet poverty will appear

Clear in the clearness of your eternal love.

Ignoring the Person

When the truth of the person is underrated or ignored in the realm of theology, this inevitably leads to the creation of a legal, external ethic. Man's ethos or morality ceases to relate to the truth of the person, to the dynamic event of true life and its existential realization. His moral problem is no longer an existential one, a problem of salvation from natural necessity; it is a pseudo-problem of objective obligations which remain existentially unjustifiable. Then repentance too is distorted by elements alien to it . . . 

--Christos Yannaras, from The Freedom of Morality

Enough

Three Word Wednesday, prompt words affair, expectation, free. Mixed feelings about this one.

Enough

I heard my share

of sermons, serving

time on straight-backed

pews, begrudging each

moment lost

                  to eternity.

My elders sat willingly

in expectation

of heavenly reward, glad

to leave all worldly affairs,

glad to rest weary

bones if only for

a moment.

They meant well.

I see that now, now

that my own bones

need rest, now that

I hope beyond all hope

to be free 

in the divine.

But we will never

decipher the mystery, try

as we might. Will we?

All we have from him

we already know,

written bold. Do

not kill, do

not steal, do

unto others.

We stumble over what

we do not have: the

in-between-the-lines,

shrouded, incomprehensible,

written in sand, faint

markings that lead us

to belief or despair. I believe

it is enough to want

to believe. It is enough.

Within and Above are synonyms

Blessed is the day when the youth discovers that Within and Above are synonyms. 

--Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his Journal Dec. 21 1834.

Kierkegaard on existence

". . . whether I am moving in the world of sensate palpability or in the world of thought, I never reason in conclusion to existence, but I reason in conclusion from existence. For example, I do not demonstrate that a stone exists but that something which exists is a stone. The court of law does not demonstrate that a criminal exists but that the accused, who does indeed exists, is a criminal. Whether one wants to call existence an accessorium [addition] or the eternal prius [presupposition], it can never be demonstrated."

--Soren Kierkegaard, from Philosophical Fragments