Lent I

There is no right way to dissever rubble—
Just shard by shard on pirouetting toes
That flit between the groaning rafters, those
Who lifted up their heads and now pay double
Under dust. So on the chafty stubble
Lay out each shattered plank, each corpse that froze
In his own trenches where the poppy grows
Along his veins; for man is born to trouble.

I cannot be rebuilt from my own grout;
Dismantle my decay to feel the sun,
For what is living in these mildew eaves
Is not myself and I would sweep it out.
For you who resurrect yourself have done
The same in souls as in the budding leaves.

Oilithreachta

This, ladies and gentlemen, is my first sestina. My apologies if it's a bit abstruse... the form took over, and I could only try to keep up with it.

The Summer breathes in rain and limestone crumbs
And nestles in the nettles for a rest
Beneath wool blankets of her heavy peace.
I sought her once, but found my eyes were blind
And feet too young to tread her ancient stones,
The incarnations of the stuff of Time.

But Summer’s chief possession is her time,
The time it takes for sprouts to grow from crumbs
Or walls to churn the weight of their own stones.
So in the pilgrimage that she calls “rest”
I rubbed my muddy eyes that lingered blind
And let her redefine the Irish “peace.”

And on the way I met a man, a piece
Of tender paper passing like the time
Between his brittle fingers with his blind
Routine of ritual tobacco crumbs.
He grinned a “Tóg go bóg é”—take a rest—
And perched to smoke his sculpture on the stones.

And as a child I might have cast some stones
Or at the least recited off a piece
Of dime-store jargon hoarded with the rest
Of my resourcefulness I lost in time.
Yet now I sat a spell to cull his crumbs,
Just old enough at least to know I’m blind.

For if there’s grace enough to heal the blind,
It tumbles down like execution stones
Beneath the slab where dogs can gather crumbs.
And on the coast of Inis Oírr there’s Peace
That soaks the rain of Irish summer-time
And trembles in the wind just like the rest

Of us. And we who take the yoke of rest
And find that mud and spittle leave us blind
May learn to see trees walking over time
(If trees could grow in Cheathrú Rua stones),
Or pass the sacramental sign of Peace
As if the dust were Eucharistic crumbs.

For here time passes like the pilgrim’s rest
And falls like sandwich crumbs that tumble blind
On stones that catch as many grains of peace.

Stones

Flow gently, stream where heroes gathered stones
And I a rock or two to throw; for there
Be giants in my soul, and I have thrown
The first of many stones and stumbled where
The saints once fell as Saul looked on and smiled.
For waters cure the cripple, spittle eyes,
Yet I have stumbled on the very wild
Stones I threw, blind after seven tries.

So flow from hidden springs I cannot see
And wash the mud or scales that still remain,
And if I don't have faith enough to part the sea
With budding rods, then be at least my cane.
For you provided blindness to the ones
Who otherwise would cast a thousand stones.

El Roi - the God who sees me

I sought thee as the magi sought the star—
Be found by me—
For heaven is so high and earth too far
For ants like me.
But in these pebbles where I often crawl
I smell the crumbs of children. Let them fall.

And I have probed the annals of the wise
To find out thee,
But only saw the mirror of my eyes—
Be found by me.
We cross the globe and chase the setting sun
And find our end is where we had begun.

So in the hollow of my empty hands,
Be found by me,
Like springs that burst within the thirsty land
That’s found by thee.
And in my desert thou hast dug a hole
To be thy hermitage within my soul.

Cornrows

“I will be found by you,” declared the Lord,
But all I saw were lines of cornrows in
A child’s hair that glistened as she warred
The heat with mud, and so I looked again.
Her brother’s hose created seas upon
The shattered sidewalk as if on earth’s third day,
And her shrill screams outdid the birds in song
To chime that it was good. And who’s to say
That they won’t touch you with their muddy toes
While my well-educated fingers hoist
A heavy page, or that they chose
The better part who never got a choice,
While he who hovered on the waters and on men
Has giggled off for me to seek again?

To Patrick

You wear obscurity like Joseph’s coat,
Meandering your way from history into myth
As if they were the same, as if you wrote
It on the wind and dared us probe its width.
For what is harder: banishing the snakes
From where they never were, or gathering them
Like sheep on Slemish, ‘til our memory wakes
Embedded in your verdant clover stems?
Walk on, as if it were the same to light
A fire on Slane as in our hearts or from
Your fingertips, and carve your crosses right
Where we would wrap our arms around the sun.
And where we can't sift form from matter, smile
Like a schoolboy, besting us in guile.

Frozen Ash

On Wednesday evening a dear friend from my M.A. university lost her mother after an abrupt chain of health issues that began with the flu. She was 58.

Thursday morning a plane went down at the Cork airport that has grown familiar to me after the past three summers. My dear friends whom I lived with knew two passengers among the victims and survivors. There were six survivors and six deaths.

Thursday afternoon a gunman (or gunkid, more accurately) entered a bank in a town down South where I have three dear friends in the police department. After the hours-long siege, the teenager tried to leave with a gun to the head of a hostage, and was killed by police snipers. He was nineteen.

This weekend has been tainted with the awareness that these beloved places of my life have been invaded by death, leaving us vulnerable and violated. For indeed Christ, who is the only one who has ever subsumed the death that subsumes us, did not annihilate death; he walked through it.

Perhaps then, if he stands above time looking on at the whole thing as one unit, then in a way he is still in all of it at once, and therefore still in the dying part. That is, at any rate, the only sense I can make of rejoicing at a time like this: if Christ right now is weeping at the tomb of Lazarus or suffering on the cross, then I suppose we can right now rejoice that the Resurrection is beginning, even as we are tasting death.

The New Creation has begun. It has begun in the resurrected flesh of Christ, who still offers his bleeding flesh to us who are still bleeding.

Spring sleeps in winter under reams of ice:
The cold can’t claw the germ of life away,
Nor life reduce the cold of this our slice
Of Illinois all bundled up in grey.

But now the daffodils, long decomposed,
Sleep silently, embalmed in frozen ash,
A crystalline memorial to those
Elusive germs among the burglar’s stash.

For you who stand above our one-way train
Of time have entered in this ice to give
Its April repercussions; our pain
Still kills you as your life yet makes us live.

And in the Valley of our frozen bone
The harvester will reap the flesh he’s sown.

Chosen to Choose

In the first conversation I had with my Irish priest in Cork, Father Padraic mentioned some of the disputes between various parties during the Protestant Reformation dealing with predestination and free will.

“The Catholic Church has never found that a divisive issue,” he told me, “because we have always looked at Mary as the example of what happens to us all when Christ enters us. She was chosen and she said ‘Yes.’ She was predestined and she freely obeyed. The same happens when Christ enters any of us.”

This is not intended to be a Marian post in particular, not one that goes from her being “highly favored” to the Immaculate Conception or from all generations calling her blessed to the role of Mother of the Church. But since the readings from the Book of Common Prayer for today depict her meeting with Elizabeth and her song of rejoicing afterwards, I remembered Father Padraic’s words over two years ago, and found comfort in the paradoxes of the Incarnation: the Creator is created in creation, we are chosen to choose.

Rejoice, my friends: as the Word has been made flesh in the womb of a virgin, he has entered the womb of creation, sanctifying the ground he treads. The Creator is in the womb, and creation will be reborn. As with her, so with us; he enters the world through his people, and we await his bursting forth from us. Blessed are we whom he has chosen; blessed are we who have chosen him.

Sonnet XXVI of Advent

My soul declares his greatness, for he’ll do
What he has done before: yea, he will stir
His might just as he stirs the barren womb,
And look upon the sojourner like her
Who served in lowliness. The Mighty One
Has done his wonders while our hearts were far
Away: He gives the rain and hides the sun,
He spreads abundance as he spread the stars.
Soon Lebanon will be a fruitful field
And fields be forests; we who dwell in night
Will live in light; the nations will be healed,
The hungry fed, the blind receive their sight.
And blessed is the chosen for her choice
To bear the ripened word and to rejoice.

Psalm 80, 147, 148
Isaiah 29:13-24
Revelation 21:22-22:5
Luke 1:39-56

All Souls

Beloved, I would grasp you like your weight
In water, or as many grains of sand,
But you would let me go;
For my own liquid fingers, as of late,
Have slipped like Time around your fleeting hand
And yielded to its flow.

So fall then like these precious autumn leaves
And dance around in winds I cannot chase—
For we’re not solids yet.
Yea, fall like tears along the heart that grieves,
For even tears will not maintain their place
But always leave it wet.

Ephemeral, we have found that Love alone,
Whose fixity we’d seek to imitate,
Is solid—like a soul—
Extending farther than the winds have blown
To gather grains that crumbled through Time’s grate
Into her greater bowl.

Dwarven Hermeneutics

In the past two months, I joined the Catholic Church, moved out of my cottage, submitted my first potential article for publication, spent a month in Ireland, bought a house in the Midwest, and enjoyed a week at the beach with my family. My brain has not been able to function more than one or two steps ahead.

Suddenly, as the dust of the past two months settles, the next step is my move across the country to start my PhD at a school I never expected to get into, and I am realizing something for the first time: I am afraid. Though my transition into academia surprised neither my friends nor my family, it still does surprise me, and I have a keen awareness that I have no idea what I am getting myself into or where it will take me.

I am quite a little girl with a finite brain stepping out into a world of intellectual giants. I feel like Bilbo Baggins, stumbling out the door with no hat, no stick, no pipe, not even a pocket handkerchief. But here's to the unplanned adventure, and here's to hoping for some Longbottom pipe weed along the way!

There were days when giants roamed the earth
With minds of iron, hearts of witty fire,
And we have tread their steps, for what that's worth,
Like bumbling dwarves aspiring to admire.
But in the caverns of these footprints, we
Have chiseled half with hubris, half with awe,
And nestled in sophomoric flattery,
Pontifications on the dirt we claw.
And I have trembled half with terror, half
With love, and stumbled on my hobbit toes,
Afraid to find a troll along the path,
Discovering as he nears he also grows.
Be gentle, giant, if ambition's charming
From a midget seeking her disarming.

Misfit Mortality

This poem comes from a more melodramatic stage of my writing, but the subject of death is rather conducive to such a style at any rate. I wrote it five years ago when it looked like my mother had cancer; for some reason, the death of my dog reminds me of these lines, awkward and choppy though they may be.

July 1, 2005

It seems our life is but a struggle we
Will lose with death, for but a moment here,
Like grass on rocky crags that fights with fear
Until the mudslide wins supremacy.
“But death is natural,” they say to me,
Like incantations echoing to sear
It on our disbelief. Nay, it is clear
That breath is; death we taste unnaturally.

With spirits that reject what bodies taste,
We fight what Reason knows we can’t defeat.
“This world is not our home,” they say in haste...
“But still it could be,” adds a homesick breeze,
“For maybe once it was,” his heart agrees,
And proves man is a longing piece of meat.

And there was a great calm...

There're Graces strewn like wildflowers that turn
Their gatherer into a child, and all
The grubby roadside violets, she will learn,
Have clutched the very hands that let them fall.
And Grace has wrapped around like ocean foam
That's deeper, fuller, older than Despair, and in
That vastness even sorrow finds a home
In depths extending deeper than the sin.
Be still, my soul, for Home is larger than
Your restlessness. Be still, for Peace is deeper
Than your tears. The runner and the sleeper
Never leave the place where they began;
For we the restless wander to the stars,
Surprised to find our roots extend that far.

Pentecost, 2010

Find rest my soul; the work is done,
And you may simply keep the feast.
There's time to rest just as to run
And to receive and pass the peace.
The calling is revealed a grace: the choice
To follow where you're fashioned to rejoice.

The Spirit hovers on the deep
That 'til today had groaned in pain,
And those who sewed in tears will reap
The New Creation green from rain.
You entered fractured, but you found the whole;
So rest, O weary Pilgrim — rest my soul.

Buried there like mushrooms

Once upon a time while I was beginning graduate school, I started an epic. It was roughly around the same time that I started this blog and was written toward the same end: to teach me to listen to the voice of Grace after years of allowing different voices to narrate my life. It was an entirely unpublishable combination of Christianity, pop psychology, and the epic tradition with absolutely no audience but the author, but I had fun with it.

I only got about 400 lines into it before grad school ran away with my brain, and no doubt by the time it is returned I will have other ambitious projects to accomplish, and it will forever remain just a prologue (which I included in a post once before) and 1.1 cantos.

But toward the beginning of that first canto I included my three earliest memories, which all involve my mother: trying (unsuccessfully) to eat dog food discretely without her noticing, coloring on the wall in an altruistic attempt to fill in a place where a painted mural had chipped and being spanked for it, and going through paper after paper in a vain attempt to draw a smile until she discovered me and my pile of frowny-faces and taught me to follow the curve of the chin.

It is an interesting conglomeration of memories: a young woman and her toddler winding their way through mischief, misunderstanding, and love. My mother was the eighth child of Polish and Czechoslovakian immigrants who had learned English from scratch and taught it to their nine children, and she took on the adventure of learning a life of Faith from scratch while teaching it to her four children. This past weekend as that young woman turned 53 and her toddler is roughly the age the mother was in the dawn of my memories, I find myself grateful for that young woman and her quest to nurture four children’s faith from conception to adulthood, and grateful to Love who consumed them all along the way.

This one’s for you, Mom. I love you.

From Grace Regained, Canto 1, lines 33-112

...So Fascination was her founding friend
And wed itself to every future trend.
Ambition grew as Wonder’s alibi
Beyond the corner of her mother’s eye
Where dog-food was a myst’ry unexplored,
And Cheerios were bland until they poured
Across the kitchen, where cherubic hands
Would gather them like well-shot rubber bands
Where they were strewn, before the muraled wall
On which a lake, electric blue, would call,
“Invade the drywall paint, and touch the pine
Trees’ vibrant green, and promenade the line
Of cartoon mountain ridges—beauty’s found
Within adventure.” But one day a round,
Endented hole transgressed her singing lake
With drywall white unsuited for its make,
Exposing vuln’rability of yea
The greatest craftsmanship, whose plight one day
Inspired a stroke of brilliance in her brain,
Unsettled by the awkward, whited stain—
For had she not a marker of that hue
That may disguise disruption of the blue?
But with dismay she found her instrument
Was insufficient to disguise the dent,
Though it was made more subtle now (she prayed)
Due to the scope of her Crayola aid.
And halfway satisfied she walked away
Partaking in diversions of the day
Until a castigating voice compelled
Her back under reproach, where she beheld
Her craftsmanship with helpless shame, the scorn
Of her she longed to please. Her heart more torn
To be considered bad than by the blows
Received, she fled for refuge where her toes
Could feel the grass, and there she saw her dad,
Yet unaware of the office she had
Committed. How she longed to meet his smile
A worthy daughter, to conceal a while
Her careless shame! So sing, O Muse, across
The mem’ry fields oppressed by concrete dross.
Proclaim thine all-sufficiency of care
To favor-craving frail ones, failing where
They long to please; proclaim forgiveness to
The child her mother, built with stronger glue,
Who read herself into her daughter’s eyes
That bore resemblance, and assumed her cries
Were from a fiery will. Forgive the two
Who hurt themselves; they know not what they do.

For thine inclusive eyes had seen the days
The child devoured paper in the maze
Of art, unable to compose a simple smile
Until her mother came and saw the pile
Of sad, discarded frowns of she who threw
Out too much paper, but whose mother knew
The mystery of teaching hands to see
And eyes to draw and will to bend its knee
Enough to parallel the present curve
She had emblazoned there with gallish nerve.
Thou saw’st the unencumbered, raw delight
The girl extracted in her mother’s sight
Because her casual discovery
Upon the deck of broom and energy
To save her mother of the chore bore fruits
Of giddy joy of bringing joy that suits
A munchkin dressed in Love. For Love it was
That strapped the kids on bikes the way it does
The fam’ly to each other, Love that blew
Upon them like Chicago wind; and through
The dampened corners of the forest, Love
Was buried there like mushrooms, treasures of
The eyes that stopped to look, of fingers who
Could bear a little dirt to probe into
The mossy corners and to gather gems
Of fungus into wicker baskets, stems
And all; Love the second language which
Her parents’ nimble fingers learned to stitch
Together fluently enough to speak
It in the home, just as the strongly meek
Bohem’an immigrants with English one
Short generation earlier had done.

Fixity

Nature's first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
—— Robert Frost

Generally, the liturgy of my year finds me every autumn soaking in the crisp smell of falling leaves, wondering perhaps if I should allow autumn to replace spring’s life-long position as my favorite season. Then every spring, I shake my head and realize that she will never lose her supremacy in my heart.

But a love of seasons did not come naturally to me, and as a little girl (and even as a teenager) I dreaded the first hints of orange in the autumn leaves, knowing that they signified an end to the vibrant green that made spring and summer so full of life. Autumn meant death, and winter was a long, cold decay.

I wished that leaves would stay just as I wished relationships would. I wished life could be hard and firm, a foundation that did not crumble with coming years. I suppose I wished that life were a thing somewhat like stone. If I had my wish, life would not be life and green would not be green. It is because the leaves fall that we know they will come again, and it is because love can be lost that I know it is eternal.

This past autumn on a retreat to the mountains with my siblings, siblings who have scattered around the world in years past and are all together for now before we scatter around the world again in a few months, I thought about the firmness of life and death and rebirth, the fixity of change. As we watch the new leaves explode into life this spring only to fall in a few months and await rebirth, we know that our loved ones and the entirety of Creation itself have taken part in a story that ends not in death, but in life.

It is a common myth that seasons pass;
For by their very nature they declare
That Life endures while stone and marble wear
Away, eternal monuments like grass
That cooled the Neolithic footprints as
They will my children’s toes, and therefore there
Is little proof of fixity but bare
And savage change itself that years amass.
For what does Autumn prove if not that Spring
Will be forever, or at least that they
Are different ways of saying the same thing,
As if in four-part harmony they’d sing:
Be still, eternal creature of a day,
For Death spells Life in a round-about way.

Manna

Sometimes I need God to show up physically. I have always imagined that if I were a better Christian I would be able to sustain my faith with the ephemeral knowledge of God's presence in my soul. I would be able to be joyful when life crumbles, to feel content in pain, to feel God's presence in isolation, all because of an intimate knowledge of God's friendship in my spirit. Whether or not that is true, I don't seem to be that Christian yet. I rather doubt I ever will be.

On Wednesday I crashed. I went home that afternoon and begged him to be near me, to let me know his nearness, to meet my physical needs with more than an ephemeral hope. A God who would take on our flesh and resurrect it must, I hope, intend to redeem the flesh and blood of our world. Banking on that, I scribbled down a prayer.

And you were always near as air
When I was battered in the war—
But I am broken flesh, and your
Ephemeral love won't mend this tear.
You may have spoken in the wind and tongues
But I would have you feed more than my lungs.

And I have loved you, in a way—
The way a cripple loves his staff
Or as a slave his master's laugh—
At least I limpingly obey.
But lest I feed your sheep here with a cane
I'll have to ask you firstly for the grain.

And you had hinted there'd be rest
Though I have only found your yoke;
But souls that never slept awoke
To find the thief become a guest.
And you would dine with me despite my fear
That I have only loaves and fishes here.

Right as I put the finishing touches on my poetic demand for God's tangible presence like the Israelites had in the wilderness all those years ago, transcribing it from my journal to my poetry book and reading it through one last time there in my cozy green cottage God provided for me almost three years ago with a green picket fence, my phone rang. It was the graduate director of one of my number 1 schools from that bleak application season. It was a long-shot school that I wasn't particularly sure accepted anyone, offering me a position with funding early enough in the season that I hadn't even had time to start getting nervous.

I don't know if the saints and martyrs had been able to get on without physical reminders of God's presence. I'm grateful that so far God does not seem to be expecting that kind of sainthood of me.

Holy Innocents

I spent yesterday evening with my sister-in-law, receiving somber updates about her cousin who flew into Haiti on Tuesday 20 minutes before the earthquake hit. Sobered by the details as he sleeps in cornfields with the orphan girls he went to serve with little food or water and the looming threat of rampant disease as bodies decay, I was in no mood to receive a call from my old KKK friend Russ this morning on my way home from a mass offered for the victims of the tragedy. I should not have answered the phone. While his editorial is not worth repeating, it somehow connected the brokenness of the shattered country to the brokenness of our sinful hearts, the decay of death in the ravaged country to the decay of bitterness in our ravaged spirits. I pray for Haiti. I pray for my cousin-in-law. I pray for Russ.

We seek the living here among the dead,
But may we find you.
Where we discover our decay instead
And cannot find you,
Then be at least the cold that slows disease
And slithers through the shelter of debris.

I heard that Herod made a careful search
And could not find you;
But in the blood of Innocents the Church
Still strains to find you.
Be never as elusive as before
And more tenacious than the shattered floor.

We asked you for a king, but found his fist—
Now may we find you—
For life, but found a Cross behind the mist—
There may we find you.
And to the slave-girl when the dust is clear
Unveil your presence that was always near.

Blood and Feathers

"Hope" is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

Emily Dickenson

Hope is not a thing with feathers, for
It does not sing or fly. Whoever told
You otherwise has never felt the cold
Despair that spreads it dragon wings to soar
Away. Hope does not fly away, O glory;
It is made of flesh and blood that fold
Around us like a Virgin's womb who's bold
To sing the Word without the tune, the story
That begins and ends in water and
The bloodbath. Any less is sentiment,
Mere air that cannot perch a soul or stand
Against the slings and arrows it is sent.
There may be Hope that flesh and blood can wear,
But disembodied hope is but Despair.

Week 2 of Advent

Enter Love, the burglar in the night
Who looks a lot like Death and fills the room
Before we know he’s there—indeed, to whom
Decay has grown accustomed in the light
Of long exposure. Death prepares her tight
Destruction, carving out a hollow tomb
Where Love can nestle in the livened womb
And burrow to the egg without a fight.
For Love alone is strong as Death, they say,
And has the power to destroy her by
The means of imitation, in the way
That passive glass can kill Medusa. Why,
If Life is formed by an invasion of
A seed, should we expect the less of Love?

Good Friday, 2009

This is a follow-up from the previous post about the middle voice of faith, but I want to add more explanation because it may sound grimmer than I intend it to. I wrote this on Good Friday after the most bleak Lent I had ever experienced, after trying to maintain faith when I couldn’t understand or feel or do anything. By the time Easter arrived two days later, I was becoming aware that God was redeeming the little hells around me. By a couple weeks later, I realized that it had ceased to surprise me. I seemed to have believed for a while, and had not realized when it had happened.

Faith does not always announce its coming with a trumpet. Sometimes it simply sneaks into the place we have prepared for it like a bandit, and by the time we see it is there we realize it had been living there for a while.

Give me a year or two, and I may call
This Friday “Good,” when savageness and rape
Have ceased to startle me the way escaping
Echoes of redemption do, and all
My over-clenching fingers simply flop
Upon whatever they receive. I’d know
It better if you spoke in Greek, to stop
My pre-established definitions. So,
Call “Good” the bleeding, punctured lung, perhaps
Because it’s swallowed in a bigger story,
The way the food I eat becomes my glory
Or that rivers swallow empty gaps;
And you who call this Friday “Good” because
You own the definitions can say this was
Belief.

And just like he did with Sarah thousands of years before, God did seem to go back over those months and rewrite my doubt into faith. Faith had made its home in the places prepared for it, and I had hardly known when it had arrived. It would figure.