“There are three necessary prayers and they have three words each. They are these: ‘Lord have mercy. Thee I adore. Into Thy hands.’ Not difficult to remember. If in times of distress you hold to these you will do well.” Elizabeth Gouge in The Scent of Water.
Overnight
The day your son calls you on the telephone
and is no more your boy, you know
he is someone else’s man.
Hi, Mom! he calls across a chasm.
You guess the joy that carved it,
and you cry, Hello!
She will be the bridge, now,
between you and your son.
Overnight he has become shy with you.
Now that he knows her secret
he has guessed your own, guessed
the journeys that his father made
to fetch a son from darkness
on the other side of utter letting go.
Hello, you say, and suddenly remember
how in the fourth grade he brought a pigeon home.
How, as if it were an ordinary coming home,
he opened the front door, walked in and called,
Hi, Mom! How his eyes were pleading,
with love, like pinions, feathering the air.
Another picking from Poetry Friday.
This original poem was posted by Jone at Deo Writer
Outside my window
outside my window
the language of spring speaks
tulips dance in the breeze as
bee symphony plays a concerto
the language of spring speaks
poppy poems emerge from the soil
bee symphony plays a concerto
industrious blue jays build their nest
poppy poems emerge from the soil
daffodils bow heads in prayer
industrious blue jays build their nest
as dogwood buds burst onto the stage
Read the rest of the poem here
More harvesting s from Poetry Friday
I copied this from a post at Kurious Kitty’s Kurio Kabinet :
I found this Pulitzer Prize winning book of poetry, Moy Sand and Gravel: Poems, by Paul Muldoon [821 MUL].
In reading through, I was stopped in my tracks by:
THE BREATHER
Think of this gravestone
as a low, long chair
strategically placed
at a turn in the stair.
My father sent me this e-mail
Dear Garg,
We loved the sand snowman saga and noted your struggle to engage. You seem to feel your career is slipping away?
Last night I attended a second session of the Truth Project at St Agnes which is an intellectual apologetic for the Christian faith. The emphasis was on the sovereignty of God in history and the shift from the focus on self to God. The crucial issue was who is in control of life?
During the discussion period a bright young father confessed how the claims of his new born infant created a tension in his life as he felt he was being distracted from the mega narrative of his destiny.
So lying in bed this morning I pondered how I wish I had replied to him, especially as a Christian journalist, who had recently returned from a period in the Middle East, insisted that finding the right perspective on any matter was very important. I wish I had said:-
“ It may be your professional career destiny is to discover an alternative energy source for the world from mixing salt water, sand and seaweed. You would thus solve the energy crises, global warming, dependence on Arab oil and air pollution. However in the eyes of God this would not be your mega narrative, but merely incidental to your identity and function as a father and husband. Your family is the mega-narrative as it is the sign of God`s eternal Kingdom, which will be celebrated eternally in heaven. Changing the nappies and doing the washing up is far more important to God than the temporal relative irrelevance of saving the world from global warming. Your fame as the discoverer of salt water energy will not be remembered in heaven, though your faithfulness to your family will be honoured by arch-angels. Your career is the mini-narrative. Your family is the mega-narrative. It is all a matter of perspective. “
The sand snow man and Joanna`s instant chicks are the real thing. The “i-love-yous” echoing around the supper table are sublime treasures.
Does this help??
Love
Dad.
I found this poem during my weekly Poetry Friday feast, it was posted by Poetry for Children.
A Prayer
by Susan Richardson
Spirit, use me today,
not in some miracle
that would make others marvel
and would make me proud.
Not in the word of wisdom
that would stay in the mind
and make me always remembered.
Not in the heroic act
that would change the world for the better
and me for the worse.
But in the mundane miracles
of honesty and truth
that keep the sky from falling
In the unremembered quiet words
that keep a soul on the path
And in the unnoticed acts
that keep the world moving
slowly closer to the light.
Sayer, Viv (Ed). 2008. Poems of Love and Longing. Llandysul: Pont Books, p. 66.
Memory Monday
Found this version of Psalm 139 at Janet’s blog at Across the Page.
Thou art the God of the early mornings, the God of the late-at-nights, the God of the mountain peaks, and the God of the sea. But, my God, my soul has further horizons than the early mornings, deeper darkness than the nights of earth, higher peaks than any mountain peaks, and greater depths than any sea in nature. Thou who art the God of all these, be my God. I cannot reach the heights or the depths; there are motives I cannot trace, dreams I cannot get at. My God, search me out.
Borrowed from Monday Poetry Sketch
Jane Yolen left this poem in the comments.
- Carrying On Carrying On
When life is a blevit of failure and grief
We carry on carrying on.
When life is so tres, even nothing’s relief,
We carry on carrying on.
When things of the future are things of the past,
When death is before us and first is the last,
When everything comes as a TNT blast,
We carry on carrying on.
When all the mananas are dwindling down,
When slips on bananas are tattered and brown,
When it’s too hard to smile and much simpler to frown
We carry on carrying on.
I’ll carry on you, if you’ll carry on me
On a tres filled with sorrow, and crackers and brie.
And the only thing tres-er is so tresjollie
That we carry on carrying on.
A poem for Richard
Yesterday morning I watched Richard dealing in an amazingly macho way with the aftermath of Benjamin’s spectacular vomit on Friday night which had significant collateral damage, as he did an effective imitation of an old fashioned wine press, as he marched back and forward in the bath on top blanket and duvet. Later in the day, I came across this poem posted at Poetry Friday which was hosted this week by Cuileann at The Holly and the Ivy. Richard immediately sprung to mind.
TO BE OF USE
On Atheism
At Across the Page, a blog I try to peek at each day, Janet blogged about the book The Irrational Season, the third book of Madeleine L’Engle’s 4-part autobiography, The Crosswicks Journals. Janet explains that in this book L’Engle’s “confronts some tough questions — about suffering, disillusionment with the institutional church, confusion and difficulty in understanding scripture or knowing God, sexuality and marriage, and even bouts of atheism, which she describes as “a virulent virus, put into the world by the Evil One for our destruction, and I come down with it as on occasion I come down with the flu.””
Sound Advice
In Little Town on the Praire by Laura Ingalls which I am reading with B&J, Caroline the mother writes the following book in Laura’s authograph album (I remember having one of those at school, I wander where it is now):
If wisdom’s ways you wisely seek,
Five things observe with care,
To whom you speak,
Of whom you speak,
And how, and when, and where
Poems for Valentines Day
I loved this poem posted by Janet on her blog at Across the Page.
It is a fragment from a poem written by Madeleine L’Engles and published in her book The Irrational Season
You are still new, my love. I do not know you.
Stranger beside me in the dark of bed,
Dreaming dreams I cannot ever enter,
Eyes closed in that unknown, familiar head.
Who are you? who have thrust and entered
My very being, penetrated so that now
I can never again be wholly separate,
Bound by shared living to this unknown thou.
I do not know you, nor do you know me,
And yet we know each other in the way
Of our primordial forbears in the garden.
Adam knew Eve. As we do, so did they.
They; we; forever strangers: austere, but true.
And yet I would not change it. You are still new.
Isabel Cristiana de Winchell Dubert, the fifteen year old daughter of an American Missionary couple, who was born in Quelimane sent me this poem on Valentines Day
1 Corinthians 13
If I speak in English, Portuguese, Latin, and study other foreign languages,
but do not unreservedly love the Most High God,
I am nothing but a croaking frog in the rice fields of Quelimane,
or a droning muezzin in the mosques of Maputo.
If I play the Flute, study Chemistry, teach the Recorder, and memorize
Thomas Gray,
and if I have enough strength to swim a Kilometer,
but do not unconditionally love the Body of Christ,
I have no talent or intelligence or might worth mentioning.
If I give up libraries, concerts, fellowship with peers, and
liturgical services,
to be an influence on children and teach Sunday school,
but do not wholeheartedly love those individual children,
I have journeyed in no depth in my heart.
No matter if I read Chaucer, Eusebius, Homer, and Bede,
no matter if I write about Hamlet, Screwtape, Augustine, or Joan of Arc,
what intellectual achievements I aim at,
my work is nothing if I do not unquestioningly love my teacher.
Knowing that God is good
The following is a conversation between Laura Ingalls and her elder sister Mary who is blind after getting scarlet fever, recorded in Little Town on the Prairie written by Laura Ingalls.
“We are all desperately wicked and inclined to evil as the sparks fly upwards,” said Mary, using the Bible words. “But that doesn’t matter.”
“What!” cried Laura.
“I mean I don’t believe we ought to think so much about ourselves, about whether we are bad or good,” Mary explained.
“But my goodness! How can anybody be good without thinking about it?” Laura demanded.
“I don’t know, I guess we couldn’t” Mary Admitted. ” I don’t know how to say what I mean very well. But -it isn’t so much thinking, as -as knowing. Just being sure of the goodness of God.”
Laura stood still, and so did Mary, because she dared not step without Laura’s arm in hers guiding her. There Mary stood in the midst of the green and flowery miles of grass rippling in the wind, under the great blue sky and white clouds sailing, and she could not see. Everyone knows that God is good. But it seemed to Laura then that Mary must be sure of it in some special way.
“You are sure, aren’t you?”, Laura said.
“Yes, I am sure of it now all the time,” Mary answered. “The Lord is my shephard, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, He leadeth me beside the still waters. I think that’s the loveliest Psalm of all.”, p
Lovely blog.