A Few Favorite Poems

Yesterday I quoted Anne Morrow Lindbergh:

Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day - like writing a poem or saying a prayer.

What follows relates to poetry and prayer.

I have a file of my poems entitled "Poems of the River" and I occasionally write ones that don't pertain to the river. I also collect poems, so here goes.


Monet Morning

Snow wrapped trees reflecting on the water
shimmer in the breaking dawn.
The river holds an impressionist hue.
(O, Claude, where are you?)
Fleeting splendor fades with no one
to capture on canvass its shades of light
before an impatient sun
erases all vestiges of night.
--Ruth A. Tucker


“Type-A Personality”

Austin International
--Diaz is paged
--Denver flight departing
--Diaz paged again, English and Spanish
--Diaz, your plane is departing.
Ticket agent tense
--mutters under breadth
--clock ticking down
--final page
--door closing.
From a distance
--Diaz saunters
--hips hugging baggy pants
--sneaker laces untied
--boards flight.
With type-A personality in tow
--I wait for Chicago departure
--secretly envying Diaz.

Ruth A. Tucker


Here's one from my favorite-poet friend, printed with permission

Feast of the Annunciation

Overshadowed.
Luke chooses his words carefully
Any writer does
Names, too
Like the four women in the family tree
Marked by shame
Some by violation
Tainted?
Maybe.
And the holy one of Israel is raised
The bastard child of a Palestinian peasant
Do you think anyone believed her?
She kept secrets:
All those things she pondered in her heart
Caught up in something bigger than all of us --
The adoption of our bastard souls
Overshadowed.
How else do you say that?
--Ted Troxell

I found this thought-provoking poem by Katha Pollittin a an old issue of "The New Yorker" (May 9, 2005, 46).

Here is the title and the first and last lines:

Rapture

It is just as they knew it would be:
the proof
of their rightness spread around them
like grass or sidewalks

among the bland custardy palaces
and picnic tables
of their reward. . . .

The angels are kind, like waiters, but not very talkative.

No wonder they gather, like exiles
straining toward faint reports
crackling up from below—
war, disaster, stars plunging into the sea.

God, it appears, is elsewhere, even here.

I do not have permission to print it but the entire poem can be found in a sermon at:
http://www.renofirstmethodist.org/sermons/2005/05-15-05.htm


2 poems on Prayer:

--Emily Dickinson

My period had come for prayer
No other Art--would do--
My Tactics missed a rudiment--
Creator--Was it you?

God grows above--so those who pray
Horizons--must ascend--
And so I stepped upon the North
To see this Curious Friend--

His House was not--no sign had He--
By Chimney--nor by Door
Could I infer his Residence--
Vast Prairies of Air

Unbroken by a Settler--
Were all that I could see--
Infinitude--Had'st Thou no Face
That I might look on Thee

The Silence condescended--
Creation stopped--for Me
But awed beyond my errand--
I worshipped--did not "pray" [#564]


--David Redding

If I could pray
Again,
I think I would begin
The way my mother
Taught me--
Beside my bed.
But when I lay me
Down,
I find I can't go back:
The bridge is burned. . . .
And so I pray You, Lord,
Once more;
Teach me this time
My soul to keep . . .
'Til prayer comes back
To me.

Quotes from Anne Morrow Lindbergh

While doing some research for my course on "Memoirs: Reading and Writing the Stories of Our Lives" that husband John and I will be teaching to American college students in Italy in October, I came across some thought-provoking quotes from Anne Morrow Lindbergh. If you haven't read her wonderful little classic, "Gift from the Sea," I would highly recommend it for some late summer reading. Here are the quotes:


After all, I don't see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood.

America, which has the most glorious present still existing in the world today, hardly stops to enjoy it, in her insatiable appetite for the future.

Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day - like writing a poem or saying a prayer.

By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.

Charles is life itself-pure life, force, like sunlight-and it is for this that I married him and this that holds me to him-caring always, caring desperately what happens to him and whatever he happens to be involved in.

Don't wish me happiness-I don't expect to be happy it's gotten beyond that, somehow. Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor-I will need them all.

For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.

Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone. His own burden in his own way.

I believe that what woman resents is not so much giving herself in pieces as giving herself purposelessly.

I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable.

I feel we are all islands - in a common sea.

I have been overcome by the beauty and richness of our life together, those early mornings setting out, those evenings gleaming with rivers and lakes below us, still holding the last light.

I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.

If you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments.

One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few.

The loneliness you get by the sea is personal and alive. It doesn't subdue you and make you feel abject. It's stimulating loneliness.

The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach - waiting for a gift from the sea.

God, Bob Dylan, and a Mysterious Morning

"It's a dark and mysterious morning." These were husband John's first words as he stood buck naked (but for his cup of coffee) looking out on the river from our bedroom loft a few minutes before 6 a.m. Lately, his first words have been raves about the sunrise. Occasionally I sit halfway up in bed and give a groggy rave of agreement, but "dark and mysterious" wasn't enough to get a rise out of me this morning. But when he offered to read a review on Bob Dylan from the August/September issue of "First Things" which arrived yesterday, I quickly came alive. Bob Dylan has been on our minds lately. We are scheduled to teach a CALL course (Calvin Academy for Life-long Learning) this fall with the title: "This Land is Your Land: American Folk Music in Story and Song" and our last session is on Bob Dylan. The review is titled "Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews," edited by Jonathan Cott. The reviewer Stephen H. Webb tells us that most of what we believed about Dylan is all a myth. He wasn't the radical-left protester some people imagined he was. There are some good quotes: "Dylan was not interested in pointing his guitar-strumming fingers at anybody unless he could probe the delusions of utopian optimism. . . . He is interested in the verities of human nature, not the possibilities of social progress. 'It's like, when somebody wants to tell me what the 'moral' thing is to do, I want them to show me. If they have anything to say about morals, I want to know what it is they do.'" Webb goes on to say, "While Dylan never wavered in his disdain for political activism . . . he also never backed down from expressing an interest in God, the Bible, and the Supernatural. In 1965, his interviewers did not know what to make of his comment that 'classical gospel could be the next trend' and that he was interested in folk music because it is 'full of legend, myth, Bible, and ghosts.'" Webb suggests that Dylan has grown in the faith, going from a simplistic fundamentalism of sorts to a more nuanced spirituality. He quotes from Dylan's album, "Time Out of Mine:" "I've been walking through the middle of nowherre, tring to get to heaven before they close the door." In an interview he confessed, "I'm determined to stand whether God will deliver me or not," and he goes on, "If we know anything about God, God is arbitrary. So people better be able to deal with that, too." Webb adds: "This album was his way of dealing with the divine hiddenness that is revealed only to those who have kept watch through the dark night of the soul." Husband John wondered aloud if Dylan is revealed here as a bit of a modern-day Job.

From Dylan, the reading continued with Richard John Neuhaus and "The Public Square," which comes at the back of every issue. Neuhaus often irritates us a lot, but not so much this time: an interesting review of John Lewis Gaddis, "The Cold War: A New History," some reflections on "Bonhoeffer Today," a well-placed seering critique of Judge Robert Pratt of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa who tackles Prison Fellowship Ministries, and an even more seering critique of Yale Divinity School's spring issue of "Reflections"--an issue devoted to "Sex and the Church." Writes Neuhaus, "I haven't read all of it, but the message seems to be: Sex good, Church bad."

Tomorrow morning Husband John promises to get back into the issue and read Timothy George on "Southern
Baptists After the Revolution," Lauren Weiner (not Winner) on "The Forgotten Queens of Islam," and a remeniscence on Jaroslav Pelikan, late professor of history at Yale, whose multi-volume history of the Christian Tradition I am now plowing through as I work on my own church history text, under contract with Zondervan.