Poem for you for Easter

Mary Harwell Sayler : Poem for Easter:  

For You,

I turned water into wine, purified in the veins

of My own body. I climbed mountains, healed

crowds of hunger, warmed a leper’s skin. For

you I chastised leaders, halted stones, wrote on

the ground each word contained in Love.

I overturned unfair prices and low wages, tabled

discussions about who’s first or last, and enjoyed

the most unlikely company.

Before My execution, I tamed a donkey, became

your beast of burden, then bled from every pore.

Once for all, I buried death, and, when I arose,

some saw Me. Some heard Me as I broke through

the veil, cloaking time and eternity, and, yes,

for you, I’d do it all again.

Amen.

 

Mary Harwell Sayler from book A Gathering of Poems

Long to Love and Memory: Poetry by John B. Tabb

The lovely, rhythmic poetry of Rev. John B. Tabb may have been written in the 19th century, but with timeless beauty and refreshing brevity, it transports us now into a keener awareness of God, nature, and ourselves.

For instance, in the very first poem of the new collection Long to Love and Memory, which Editor E.L. Core and Ex Fontibus kindly sent me to review, the poet writes “To a Songster,” thereby crooning the criteria for his own poetic voice:

“O little bird, I’d be
A Poet like to thee,
Singing my native song –
Brief to the ear, but long
To Love and Memory.”

Often writing in quatrains with an a/b/a/b or a/b/b/a (appropriately "Abba") pattern of rhymes, the poet did not refrain from looking at human nature and himself in all honesty. For example, consider “The Stranger.”

“He entered; but the mask he wore
Concealed his face from me.
Still, something I had seen before
He brought to memory.

“'Who art thou? What thy rank, thy name?’
I questioned with surprise;
‘Thyself,' the laughing answer came,
‘As seen of others’ eyes’.”

And take a look at “An Influence.”

“I see thee – heaven’s unclouded face
A vacancy around thee made,
Its sunshine a subservient grace
Thy lovelier light to shade.

I feel thee, as the billows feel
A river freshening the brine;
A life’s libation poured to heal
The bitterness of mine.”

God’s creation has a healing effect on the poet, and, therefore, on us, the readers.

Again and again, Fr. Tabb’s insightful verses give us an accurate picture of how human nature inhabits (but, hopefully, does not inhibit!) both the natural and spiritual worlds. Mostly, though, the poems encourage us to see through the poet’s lenses of faith.

Ironically, Rev. Tabb lost his physical eyesight before his death, but in my studies of the works of Christian poets, I’ve found none more capable of seeing himself and God’s hand so clearly. Look, for instance, at this “Song.”

“Fade not yet, O summer day,
For my love hath answered yea;
Keep us from the coming night,
Lest our blossom suffer blight.

Fear thou not; if love be true,
Closer will it cleave to you.
‘Tis the darkened hours that prove
Faith or faithlessness in love.”

Since I’m writing this while taking a break from the intensive preparations needed before a Cat 5 hurricane arrives in Florida, this exquisitely wrought collection has given me the opportunity to refresh myself again with Rev. Tabb’s poems and wait out the storm with a timely boost in faith.

As countless other people also experience storms, floods, earthquakes, and their aftermaths, Fr. Tabb’s poem “Evolution” will surely bring comfort and relief.

“Out of the dusk a shadow,
Then, a spark;
Out of the cloud a silence,
Then, a lark;
Out of the heart a rapture,
Then, a pain;
Out of the dead, cold ashes,
Life again.”

Mary Sayler, ©2017, placed 30 books in all genres with Christian and educational publishers before self-publishing her new book, What the Bible Says About Love, which she hopes and prays will be her first in a series of topical Bible research and prayer-a-phrases.

Long to Love and Memory, paperback



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Rest in the Moment

The drama of Lent and Passion of Christ propel us to rise with the Lord on Easter Sunday, but then what? Can that heightened awareness of our Lord and Savior continue throughout the year, and, if so, how?

In Rest in the Moment, poet-writer Christine Sine, who kindly sent me a copy of her book to review, responds to our need for closeness in her “Reflections for Godly Pauses.”

As explained in the Introduction, we have two types of silence: quies, which comes from an absense of noise, and silentium, “an internal, intentional posture of complete attentiveness toward God. It is a silence of making space for, taking time for and paying loving attention to the One we proclaim to be our God and Lord…. It means establishing a quiet inner attitude in which we set aside the distractions of our minds and hearts, draw from the stillness that is within us and commune with God in a very special way.”

After explaining this insightful way to be close to the Lord, the book further provides the means: first, in a meditative poem followed by a brief devotional and relevant scripture, then spaces to respond before closing in prayer.

The twelve meditations in this book get off to a blessed start with the title poem, “Rest in the Moment,” which begins with these lines:

“Rest in this moment of God’s creating.
Savor its beauty.
Inhale its fragrance.
Listen to its music.
Sit in awe of our God-infused world.
Rest in this moment of God’s unfolding….

As the author says in the devotional lines that follow, “This is an elusive rest. It means letting to of control over our schedules and our relationships. Sometimes it means letting go of things that we love to do or people we care about to create time to notice and appreciate the presence of God.”

The Apostle Paul talks about this rest in Philippians 4:11-13, where he says, he’s “learned to be content with whatever I have.”

The pages then turn to our response as we’re asked to consider “What distracts your attention from being fully attentive to God?” For each of us, the answers will differ, of course, and yet each of us can give our “Amen” to the closing prayer, which asks God to “Guide us to rest in each moment and enjoy the revelation of Your love it reveals.”

So? you might ask. What does this have to do with poetry or poetry writing? Perhaps nothing to the secular poet who’s waiting for the Muse to strike, but to me – everything!

If you want your poetry to be insightful, powerful, blessed, and a blessing to your readers, re-read the above discussion, rest well in the Lord, then let your poems flow with new depths and passion.

Mary Harwell Sayler, © 2017, poet-writer, reviewer


Rest in the Moment, paperback



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Christian Poet Scott Cairns

Scott Cairns collected his poems in a new book entitled Slow Pilgrim, which recollects his pilgrimage as a Christian in many of the poems.

Using the concept he refers to as “sacramental poetics,” Cairns brings together theology and poetry as did poets of the past, who saw this connectedness in the “Logos.” Indeed, as the Introduction to the book reminds us, “The Greek word for ‘word’ is logos, familiar to us from the opening of the Gospel of St. John. But Cairns believes that in modern Western thought logos has too often reduced ‘word’ to disembodied abstraction. He prefers the Hebrew word davar, which means both word and thing – and even, as he notes, a power.”

And “yet one of the key milestones along his pilgrimage has been his embrace of the Orthodox tradition of ‘apophatic’ theology, which is an expression of humility before the inadequacy of language.” This apophatic theology helps us to know God by stating Who or What God is not, rather than Who or What God is. For example, when we say God is immortal, we’re saying God does not die. Or if we call God a Spirit, we’re saying God isn't confined to a physical form as we are. Or if we say God is truth, we’re saying God does not lie.

Often Christian poets and writers rely on metaphor or analogy to equate God with this or that. Or perhaps we present a particular point-of-view or communicate an experience. Conversely, Cairns’ pilgrimage is more inclined to take us from communication into communion, slowing us down, so we can listen between the lines and hear the silence that arises into worship or poetry.

This is not, however, a devotional book, nor collection of inspirational writings. As the Introduction tells us, these “poems address us in our quotidian experience of life: they are best experienced in an armchair, not in church.”

For example, “Taking Off Our Clothes” strips us down to our real selves where:

“We’d talk about real things, casually
and easily taking off our clothes. We would be
naked and would hold onto each other a long time,
saying things that would make us
grin. We’d laugh off and on, all the time
unconcerned with things like breath, or salty
skin, or the way our gums show when we really
smile big. After a while, I’d get you a glass of water.”

This use of the visible, the tangible rather than the abstract, calls us to recognizable truths, such as how getting real with ourselves and each other makes us feel naked. In these times of vulnerability, we might do nothing more God-like than bringing each other a cup of cool water in Christ’s name.

Since the poem just quoted in part comes at the beginning of the book, readers will know upfront not to expect anything sentimental or puritanical. Having squirmed through too many of the latter types of poems or flat statements of belief or long-winded diatribes, a subtle invitation to find God among real people in real life can, itself, be as refreshing as that glass of water.

This time I knew to expect such an approach as the publisher, Paraclete Press, who kindly sent me a review copy, had done the same last year for Cairns’ book, Idiot Psalms. However, to claim familiarity with the work of this respected poet would be misleading as I suspect I’ll never fully catch what’s compressed into each poem.

Sometimes this slowness to comprehend occurs because of differences in male and female perspectives but also because of the poet’s artistry in drawing negative spaces that may or may not be filled with God’s invisible presence. That said, Cairns can use metaphor well when he wants to as shown in the poem “4. Mortal Dream” where “It is not a very clean city, even the air has fingerprints.”

For the most part, though, I found the poems accessible and occasionally amusing. For example, “5. My Imitation” begins:

“I sold my possessions, even the colorful pencils.
I gave all my money to the dull. I gave my poverty
to the president. I became a child again, naked
and relatively innocent. I let the president have my guilt.”

But what seems to be humorous turns into a common union with Christ as the poem continues:

“I found a virgin and asked her to be my mother.
She held me very sweetly.”

And ends:

“I rose again, bloodless and feeling pretty good.

I forgave everything.”

Unlike the sweet greeting card verses that assure us all is well even when it isn’t, I’m more attuned to the hope we have in Christ when reading such lines as: “And still I have suffered/ an acute lack of despair.” Yes! How true!

Besides our lack of despair, aren’t we all archaeologists? As shown in “Archaeology: A Subsequent Lecture,” we see:

“…the pleasure lies

in fingering loose ends toward likely shape,
actually making something of these bits
of persons, places, things one finds once one

commences late interrogation
of undervalued, overlooked terrain –
what we in the business like to call the dig.”

In addition to digging through our collective or individual past, these poems give us a new take on familiar Bible stories such as told in the poem “The Entrance of Sin.” In its departure from the Genesis 3 story, the second paragraph of this prose poem offers a prior scenario:

“For sin had made its entrance long before the serpent spoke, long before the woman and the man had set their teeth to the pale, stringy flesh, which was, it turns out, also quite without flavor. Rather, sin had come in the midst of an evening stroll, when the woman had reached to take the man’s hand and he withheld it.”

I love that a man wrote those lines! And I welcomed the insight into relationships today. I also enjoyed the dry humor, as in “Possible Answers To Prayer,” where:

“Your petitions – though they continue to bear
just the one signature – have been duly recorded.”

Then these exquisite lines in “I. Nativity” give us a glimpse of that biblical scene as told from the perspective of a man gazing on a woman beloved:

“As you lean in, you’ll surely apprehend
the tiny God is wrapped
in something more than swaddle. The God

is tightly bound within
His blessed mother’s gaze….”

The poem continues:

“…Overhead,

the famous star is all
but out of sight by now; yet, even so,
it aims a single ray

directing our slow pilgrims to the core
where all the journeys meet,
appalling crux and hallowed cave and womb,

where crouched among these other
lowing cattle at their trough, our travelers
receive that creatured air, and pray.”


©2015, Mary Harwell Sayler, poet-writer in all genres and lifelong lover of Christ, the Bible, and poetry


Slow Pilgrim, quality paperback



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Eyes Have I That See: review of selected poems by priest-poet, John Julian

As a long-time lover of poetry by priest-poets, I was delighted to receive a review copy of Eyes Have I That See: selected poems of Fr. John Julian, which Paraclete Press kindly sent me to review.

According to the back cover, Fr. Julian’s work has been compared to other priest-poets such as George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins, but that may be like comparing peaches and pears! Besides the differing forms and styles, the poems of the two G. H.’s flow with succulent phrases and sweet praise, whereas the poetry of Fr. Julian has a contemporary bite.

As soon as I said that, however, I opened the book again and re-read the first poem, which, yes, makes me think of the Episcopal priest George Herbert in a beautiful litany appropriate for liturgy! The poem, “Anima Christi,” begins by calling:

“Soul of Christ, O, consecrate me;
Flesh of Christ, emancipate me;
Blood of Christ, intoxicate me;
Water from Christ’s side, repair me….”

These exquisite lines continue, focusing on Christ before closing with a plea, “That forever I may praise Thee. Amen.”

As the collection continues, the “I” of the poem could be me, you, the poet, or, most likely, the voice of people since the beginning of time, for instance, as “My golden fruit/ Lies tarnished now” in “The Apple Tree,” and “Gethsemane, BC,” calls on Isaac to arise.

In the poem “’Twixt Dinner And The Tree,” we see “The Beloved gathered” between the Last Supper and the cross and find:

“Old wildly verbal Peter had already felt his words
twist back, his promises stumbling to unanticipated oblivion;
poor James hid dark in tears in some far kosher corner….”

Other poems present contemporary reflections of biblical stories threaded with the timelessness that connects us. Most lines unwind as free verse with others occasionally aligning into traditional meter as shown in this first verse of “Incarnatus.”

“Bethlehem broadened and filled our horizons,
The stable demanded our hearts in return;
God spoke the Word in the flesh of a Man-child
And wrote with that Body what mankind must learn.”

In the last pages, we find thirteen cantos comprising the poem “Ave Maria” as Christ’s Mother Mary accompanies her Son through each crucial moment of His life and death. This long poem provides a fitting way to end the book, and yet, an earlier poem, “Oblation,” made me think of her – and us.

“In all that I do
You act;
In all that I say,
You speak;
In all that I wish,
You will;
In all that I am,
You are.”



©2015, Mary Harwell Sayler, writer and reviewer.

Eyes Have I That See: selected poems, paperback



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Poetry Book Review: New Collected Poems of Wendell Berry

Meeting Wendell Berry several years ago, I found his warm handshake and pleasant voice as down-to-earth as his poems and lifestyle, deeply rooted in his Kentucky farm. Since then, I’ve continued to be an admirer of his poetry and essays, often found in Christian journals or religious publications from most church denominations. I've enjoyed, too, reviews of his many books, for instance, as Glynn Young discussed recently in his article, “Wendell Berry and the Land.”

When my review copy of the New Collected Poems arrived a few weeks ago from Counterpoint Press, I began reading right away, thinking I’d quickly post a review, but I was wrong. These poems do not want a quick read but the slow savor one saves for the scrumptious, mouthwatering main meal of the day.

As the contents show, the collection consists of a banquet of books beginning with The Broken Ground in 1964 and continuing through the 2010 book, Leavings. Reading the poems along this timeline can be especially instructive if you’re a poet in search of a mentor, which the poetry itself can be.

Wendell Berry, however, won’t be likely to read the poems with you. As the opening poem, “The Country of Déjà vu,” explains: “My old poems – I like them all/ well enough when they were new,” but now “I have no need to go back to” them. This doesn’t seem to express dissatisfaction but rather declares no particular need for living in or revisiting the past.

Although written as a tribute to a fellow poet and Kentuckian, “A Man Walking and Singing” shows “His singing becomes conglomerate/ of all he sees,/ leaving the street behind him/ runged as a ladder/ or the staff of a song.” And then in “The Design of the House,” we see “the flower/ forgets its growing,” which the very timeline in a collection of memorable poems might be less inclined to let a poet do.

That same poem looks not to the past but the future where “the house is a shambles/ unless the vision of its perfection/ upholds it like stone.” And later in this “Design,” we see the blueprint followed as “Love has conceived a house,/ and out of its labor/ brought forth its likeness.”

As part of that pattern of love, “The Handing Down” reminds us “It is the effort of design/ to triumph over the imperfections/ of the parts.” These wise words go on to warn, “The mind falsifies its objects/ by inattention,” and it seems to me that this is an important advisory to poets, artists, and people in general: Pay attention! Otherwise, we’re apt to sketch a skewed version of what’s there.

Really looking, really seeing, and clearly observing the real might not always be pleasant though, as this same poem of legacy and love continues: “He has lived a long time./ He has seen the changes of times/ and grown used to the world/ again.”

We all experience change. That fact and the warm tones pull us toward the poem, “The Thought of Something Else,” where “the mind turns, seeks a new/ nativity – another place,/ simpler, less weighted/ by what has already been.” And, with the poet, we want to seek “– a place where thought/ can take its shape/ as quietly in the mind/ as water in a pitcher.”

For Wendell Berry that place has been his family farm, where life and death employ seasons of growing. In “Song In A Year Of Catastrophe,” for instance, a prophetic voice says “Die/ into what the earth requires of you.” And the “I” of the poem responds: “I let go all holds then, and sank/ like a hopeless swimmer into the earth,/ and at last came fully into the ease/ and the joy of that place,/ all my lost ones returning.”

© 2014, Mary Harwell Sayler


New Collected Poems, Wendell Berry, paperback



New Collected Poems, Wendell Berry, Kindle Edition, e-book



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Review of Pity the Beautiful by Dana Gioia

In the preface of his seminal book, Can Poetry Matter: Essays on Poetry and American Culture, Dana Gioia set forth this standard: “While it is a critic’s task to analyze a literary work, the reader needs only to experience it.”

So true, but then when I received a review copy of Dana Gioia’s new book of poems, Pity the Beautiful, for the sole purpose of reviewing (aka “critiquing” aka “analyzing”), I felt at odds with those roles, first trying to assess what the poet had accomplished and how before giving myself up to the experience of reading, enjoying, absorbing, and “being there” in the poems.

As I read it or, perhaps, felt it, the opening poem “The Present” hints of the pity of putting aside the enjoyment of a gift given, whether by God or another Lover, who left an unopened gift beside “our bed.” Both possibilities of the Giver also seemed likely in light of the second poem, “The Angel with the Broken Wing,” who once “stood beside a gilded altar where/ The hopeless offered God their misery.”

The next poem “Prophecy” beautifies that source of misery by saying, “I found my Via Dolorosa in your love,” but whose love? God’s or another person’s and does it matter? Or, to be more precise, can we separate one love from another as God is love and source, moving like living water through us and our relationships?

To be clear though, this collection of poems does not focus on lost loves, but life itself. Again, in “Prophecy,” for example, “It’s not so much what’s spoken as what’s heard –/ and recognized, of course. The gift is listening/ and hearing what is meant only for you.” So there’s that gift again, opened and heard or not – a theme that winds down “The Road” where the narrator has “sometimes felt that he had missed his life/ By being far too busy looking for it.”

Conversely, some of us seek gifts that don’t really matter, such as experienced in “Shopping” where “I would buy happiness if I could find it,/ Spend all that I possessed or could borrow./ But what can I bring you from these sad emporia?/ Where in this splendid clutter/ Shall I discover the one true thing?”

The second of five sections takes a different route toward discovering that “one true thing” in “Prayer At Winter Solstice” where we see fresh views and insight in a plethora of blessings: “Blessed is the road that keeps us homeless./ Blessed is the mountain that blocks our way” and, later, “Blessed is the cold that teaches us to feel” and “Blessed is the pain that humbles us.”

While few of us seek such thorny gifts, the poet helps us to see these incidents and discomforts as gifts to be received gratefully for the deepening of our spiritual lives, which joy and sorrow widen in subsequent poems.

For example, the humor used in addressing “The Seven Deadly Sins” coaxes us to recall similar experiences where “The food’s so bad that even Gluttony/ can’t finish his meal.” With wit to remove the sting, we might be more likely to identify areas in our own lives in need of reconsidering or correcting as we accept and forgive our disappointments in ourselves.

Then, the opposite of humor arrives to increase our awareness of life’s gifts in the beautifully wrought, heartrending poem, “Special Treatments Ward,” which begins with the introduction: “So this is where the children come to die,/ hidden on the hospital’s highest floor.” These beautiful children “wear their bandages like uniforms,” while tired mothers spend the nights on cots until “they slip/ beside their children, as if they might mesh/ those small bruised bodies back into their flesh.”

Oh, isn’t that what God Our Heavenly Father/ Mother does for us in Christ Who bears our bruises?

Well, I could go on to tell you about the remaining sections of the book with its ghost story and lively rhymed and metered title poem where we “Pity the night/ the stars lose their shine” or “The Argument” where “After you put the phone down,/ The words don’t vanish all at once.” But I would have to address almost every poem in the book to give you a glimpse of the beauty that, without a hint of didacticism, encourage us to accept each gift and fully experience our own lives.


© 2014, Mary Harwell Sayler, reviewer


Pity the Beautiful, paperback




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Poetry Book Review: Idiot Psalms by Scott Cairns

In Idiot Psalms, just published by Paraclete Press, Scott Cairn’s new book of poetry takes off with “High Plane,” an almost sonnet, almost blank verse poem whose musicality makes melodious revisions in the tentative descriptions of flight, life, and the divide between knowing and remaining open to the unknown. The poem and its placement before the beginning of the IV sections give us a preface and a hint of the poetic questionings yet to come.

In the first poem of the first section, for example, “Parable” asks “To what might this slow puzzle be compared?” as we try out metaphors that might clarify the mystery of “The Vast and Inexplicable” even though none “quite seems to satisfy.”

Gliding on to “Threnody,” I halted mid-flight to look up the title word, which means a lament that, in this instance, refers to a recurrent dream of a deceased parent, returning where “none of us/ dares speak, neither of his death nor/ of his sudden, startling return.” The inexplicable continues in “Irreducible is what I’m after,” where “words are more precise or less precise, but they/ are not exact…” so that “even as/ I speak I see my good intentions leaping clean/ beyond my reach….”

In “Idiot Psalm 1,” we encounter Isaak, just “shy/ of immolation,” who, having been let off the sacrificial hook, sees God as “Beloved if obliquely so.” Later, in “Idiot Psalm 4,” this son of Abraham admits, “If I had anything approaching,/ a new song, surely I would sing” – an admission most of us might well make from almost any unfavorable condition or position into which we’ve been tightly wedged for far too long. And yet, tension-relievers come as we “keep things metaphorical/ and in so doing hope to keep/ anxiety at bay….” or as we witness the wit drawn when “the sea will of occasion/ skip the boats like flat stones back to shore.”

Consistently, honest observation and insight speak through these poems such as “Two Trees,” where we might get beyond that initial quest for knowledge of good and evil and “move finally/ to the second tree, long/ abandoned, all but lost/ to tribal memory.” Although this tree of life “stands to quicken any who/ would care to eat of it,” the poem “Heavenly City” reminds us “The world remains a puzzle/ no matter how many weeks one stands/ apart from it, no matter how one tries/ to see its troubled surfaces, or hopes/ to dip beneath them for a glimpse of what it is/ that makes this all appear to tremble so.”

And yet, the difficulty of the search does not deter Scott Cairns from seeking to define the mystery, for example, in “Idiot Psalm 10” where glimpses of God occur metaphorically as the “Hidden Hand upholding” and the “Great Zookeeper, attending” and the “Most Secret Agent of our numberless/ occasions….”

As we near the end of the book, the poem “Draw Near” concludes with this admission: “I have no sense of what this means to you, so little/ sense of what to make of it myself, save one lit glimpse/ of how we live and move, a more expansive sense in Whom.” That “Whom” clarifies with the “Annunciation” where “we all become/ the kindled kindred of a king whose birth/ thereafter bears to all a bright nativity.”

In that light of Christ, referred to as the “Holy One,” the final poem in this highly recommended book asks that we might come to “the cup, before the coal/ is set upon our trembling tongues, before/ we blithely turn and walk again into our many other failures” and somehow “apprehend something of the fear/ with which we should attend this sacrifice,/ for which we shall not ever be found worthy,/ for which – I gather – we shall never be prepared.”

©2014 Mary Harwell Sayler, reviewer


Idiot Psalms: New Poems, paperback