On Writing

Dylan Thomas on Poetry
These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I'd be a damn' fool if they weren't.

Thomas Merton on Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas' integrity as a poet makes me very ashamed of the verse I have been writing. We who say we love God: why are we not as anxious to be perfect in our art as we pretend we want to be in our service of God? If we do ot try to be perfect in what we write, perhaps it is because we are not writing for God after all. In any case it is depressing that those who serve God and love Him sometimes write so badly, when those who do not believe in Him take pains to write so well. I am not talking about grammar and syntax, but about having something to say and saying it in sentences that are not half dead. Saint Paul and Saint Ignatius Martyr did not bother about grammar but they certainly knew how to write.

The fact that your subject may be very important in itself does not necessarily mean that what you have written about is important. A bad book about the love of God remains a bad book, even though it may be about the love of God. There are many who think that because they have written about God, they have written good books. Then men pick up these books and say: if the ones who say they believe in God cannot find anything than this to say about it, their religion cannot be worth much.

Praise Song for the Day

Elizabeth Alexander



Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other,
catching each other’s eyes
or not
about to speak
or speaking.
All about us is noise.
All about us is noise and bramble,
thorn and din,
each one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem,
darning a hole in a uniform,
patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.
Someone is trying to make music somewhere
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, “Take out your pencils. Begin.”

We encounter each other in words
words spiny or smooth,
whispered or declaimed;
words to consider,
reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways
that mark the will of someone and then others who said,
“I need to see what’s on the other side.
I know there’s something better down the road.”

We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce,
built brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle.
Praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by “love thy neighbor as thyself.”
Others by “first, do no harm” or “take no more than you need.”
What if the mightiest word is “love”
love beyond marital, filial, national;
love that casts a widening pool of light;
love with no need to preempt grievance?

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
anything can be made,
any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,
praise song for walking forward in that light.

Read after Barack Obama's inaugural address
January 20, 2009

The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower

Dylan Thomas

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

The Peace of Wild Things

Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Prayer

Louis Untermeyer

GOD, though this life is but a wraith,
Although we know not what we use,
Although we grope with little faith,
Give me the heart to fight—and lose.

Ever insurgent let me be,
Make me more daring than devout;
From sleek contentment keep me free,
And fill me with a buoyant doubt.

Open my eyes to visions girt
With beauty, and with wonder lit—
But always let me see the dirt,
And all that spawn and die in it.

Open my ears to music; let
Me thrill with Spring's first flutes and drums—
But never let me dare forget
The bitter ballads of the slums.

From compromise and things half done,
Keep me with stern and stubborn pride;
And when at last the fight is won,
God, keep me still unsatisfied.

Book of Hours

by Rainer Maria Rilke
I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.

Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that's wide and timeless.
So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a gravesite
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots
embrace:

a dream once lost
among sorrows and songs.

Rilke's Book of Hours, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

Ulysses

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel; I will drink
Life to the lees. All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea. I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known,-- cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honor'd of them all,--
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
to whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,--
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill
This labor, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail;
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me,--
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads,-- you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.
Death closes all; but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends.
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,--
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Wine from These Grapes

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Wine from these grapes I shall be treading surely
Morning and noon and night until I die.
Stained with these grapes I shall lie down to die.

If you would speak with me on any matter,
At any time, come where these grapes are grown;
And you will find me treading them to must.
Lean then above me sagely, lest I spatter
Drops of the wine I tread from grapes and dust.

Stained with these grapes I shall lie down to die.
Three women come to wash me clean
Shall not erase this stain.
Nor leave me lying purely,
Awaiting the black lover.
Death, fumbling to uncover
My body in his bed,
Shall know
There has been one
Before him.


Reflections on the poem
Stephanie A. Hart

This is one of my favorite poems, but why would the author, a wildly promiscuous woman living in bohemian Greenwich Village at the height of the roaring 20's, care to write something which seems to evoke such a powerful image of Christ. Perhaps, Edna never meant it to be Christian, but in reading her work, I often discover religious themes coming through the pages.

Yearly around Easter time, this poem pushes its way to the foreground of my thoughts. This year, my books boxed away, I searched four libraries and the internet to find a copy. When I finally found it on a dusty shelf and turned its brittle pages, its words hit me again with their rich themes.

Wine from these grapes I shall be treading surely
Morning and noon and night until I die.
Stained with these grapes I shall lie down to die.

Christ was in the business of redeeming the ordinary, of taking on the hard, messy work of transformation. He did not shy away from the pain and stain of the labors that he knew would ultimately produce something wonderful. Christ was a true winemaker, from his first miracle in Cana to his last days, Christ was working in large ways and small at turning the ordinary into something extraordinary. No time for rest, his work goes on morning and noon and night.

If you would speak with me on any matter,
At any time, come where these grapes are grown;
And you will find me treading them to must.
Lean then above me sagely, lest I spatter
Drops of the wine I tread from grapes and dust.

Christ was in the business of transforming people, his work was in the vineyard. We are all welcome, but if we seek his council, we must be careful, Christ is in the business of transforming the ordinary. If we ask for advice, we must come to where the work is, and we may find ourselves spattered and stained and changed by it. Be careful, Christ is in the business of redeeming the ordinary morning and noon and night.

Stained with these grapes I shall lie down to die.
Three women come to wash me clean
Shall not erase this stain.
Nor leave me lying purely,
Awaiting the black lover.

In death, his body bore the physical markings of his work. With dirt under his nails and wounds in his flesh, he could not be washed clean of all that this world had done to him. Christ was stained by his work, and as much as it transformed the ordinary around him, it also transformed his body. That body became a sign pointing to the extraordinary work of his life.

Death, fumbling to uncover
My body in his bed,
Shall know
There has been one
Before him.

And then there is the resurrection. The duping of death who comes to find only bedclothes where a broken body should have been. This master of re-creation and transformation finds himself the ultimate example of the transforming power he came to show us all.

It is a beautiful tale for the Easter season. That Christ was in the work of redemption and resurrection of taking the ordinary and making it holy should seem an odd theme for the poetical meanderings of this wild woman of words, but maybe that is precisely where his story is best told. After all, it was a woman of ill repute that Christ met at the well, a sinner that washed his feet with her tears, a tax collector in whose house he dined, a betrayer, a doubter and a denier with whom he shared his last days and it is to us, the broken, unfaithful, dispossessed, lost, wandering, stumbling souls that he continues to come and work his redemption, looking into our lives and seeing us lost, seeing our disobedience, the searching and seeking and sulking for pleasure. It is the self-entitled rantings with which we justify our selfish actions to which he listens, as exhausted as to Peter's persistent missteps and mis-theology, continuing to offer his measured and long-suffering way to peace each time we return to him unchanged.

Christ is in the business of redeeming us, of trampling us into wine. We drift along unaware of the forces shaping us, we glut ourselves on the wrong kinds and wrong minds of thought we turn from instruction that would heal us and play the physician to our own ailing souls. And yet he is there morning and noon and night treading grapes into wine, waiting for us to join him.

I imagine that if we were to come, to lean over the Savior sagely, hoping to avoid getting spattered by this messy work of transformation, we might seek his council for a time and might even find him attentive, but eventually he would need to get back to work and eventually we would need to either join in or leave him to his labors. Christ is in the business of redeeming the ordinary in us all—morning and noon and night. But we are not invalids in this process, not helpless. Christ waits for us to join the work, which is daily transforming our ordinary into something divine.

We find ourselves at Easter going to the Lord's house again and again and again, to eat and be fed by this transforming, resurrecting power. We find ourselves scurrying around following the Savior, trying to keep up, trying, by our mere presence, to glean the wisdom and worth of the season without getting messy in the process. But more often than not, Christ does not transform us in this way, at least not in the long-haul. Christ has very little interest in hearing our sob stories again and again or having us trail along, trying to parse out the mundane meaning of our day-to-day, because Christ is about transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary, of engaging us in the hard and often messy work of transformation.

It happens when we feed the poor or heal the sick, it happens when we listen to the lonely and comfort the dying, it happens when we visit the prisoner and pray for the struggling, and it happens when we bite our tongues of selfish words, and keep our path from selfish ways and die to ourselves for the sake of our friends, our families and even complete strangers. It happens when we take on the passion of Christ and learn to walk the way of the cross each and every day, to take the pieces of us that are ordinary and trample them into the extraordinary. It happens when we decide to stop tiptoeing around the border of Christ's work, roll-up our pant legs and step in.

From his first acts of public ministry to the final footwashing, Christ was getting dirty doing the hard work of transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary morning and noon and night. The lord of the harvest, the lord of the labor and the lord of the rich reward beckons us to become a part of that service. To descend into the winepress and to arise transformed by the work. Christ longs for us to surrender ourselves to the work of the church, not because we are martyrs who thrive on discomforting ourselves, but because we are Christians, followers of Christ, and that is where Christ is leading us.

We know that Christ led a full life, we know that he had friends he held as dear as family, we know that he suffered for the Lord, and ultimately received the reward for his labors and is seated at the right hand of the Father in glory, and yet, we are still reluctant to follow in his footsteps and engage in the work he started, not because we doubt who he was, but because we are unwilling to risk the discomfort of change for the reward of transformation. We are too scared to inconvenience ourselves with the poor to receive the redemption it would bring, and we are too greedy to give up our own personal vices of hatred, of excess, of secret sin in exchange for the life altering transformation we might find. And because we live in this fear and lazily wait in the shadows for Christ to leave the vineyard, we remain unchanged—morning and noon and night.

We are content to lean sagely over the savior, allowing Christ to do the real work, gleaning anecdotal stories of service and sacrifice to continue rubber-stamping our sorry secluded and sepulchered lives, instead of joining Christ on the trampling floor and staining ourselves with work. Lord save us from the complacency of self that keeps us ordinary, save us from the complacency of the poor that keeps us unchanged and save us from the complacency of your sacrifice that keeps you in the grave all these many years.

May we join Christ where the grapes are grown, may we learn to take up the hard task of changing the ordinary into extraordinary, may we learn to daily tread grapes into wine—morning and noon and night.

Sailing to Byzantium

by William Butler Yeats

I
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.


II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

III
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

IV
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.