poetry

Starlings in Winter

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Starling image from wired.com

Starling image from wired.com

This past Sunday I had the opportunity to be a guest minister at the Peterborough Unitarian Fellowship.   My reflection was based in part on Starlings in Winter; Mary Oliver’s beautiful and astute observations on that marvellous “wheel of many parts” that is starlings in flight.  Watching that dance renews my spirit as Oliver captures so well.

 
Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly

they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can’t imagine

how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard.  I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

 

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School Prayer

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the guardians. painting by ann altman. words by diane ackerman. from syracruse cultural workers.com

I love this poem “School Prayer” by Diane Ackerman. The second verse speaks to me of what it means to be a Unitarian minister.

In the name of the daybreak
and the eyelids of morning
and the wayfaring moon
and the night when it departs,

I swear I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred,
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,
as a healer of misery,
as a messenger of wonder,
as an architect of peace.

In the name of the sun and its mirrors
and the day that embraces it
and the cloud veils drawn over it
and the uttermost night
and the male and the female
and the plants bursting with seed
and the crowning seasons
of the firefly and the apple,

I will honor all life
—wherever and in whatever form
it may dwell—on Earth my home,
and in the mansions of the stars.

From I Praise My Destroyer (Vintage Books, 2000)

in the gale…

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For those living through the Hurricane Sandy …

image from scrapetv.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

And sweetest –  in the gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.

Emily Dickinson

Last Night the Rain Spoke to Me

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Last night
the rain
spoke to me
slowly, saying,

what joy
to come falling
out of the brisk cloud,
to be happy again

in a new way
on the earth!
That’s what it said
as it dropped,

smelling of iron,
and vanished
like a dream of the ocean
into the branches

and the grass below.
Then it was over.
The sky cleared.
I was standing

under a tree.
The tree was a tree
with happy leaves
and I was myself,

and there were stars in the sky
that were also themselves
at the moment
at which moment

my right hand
was holding my left hand
which was holding the tree
which was filled with stars

and the soft rain –
imagine! imagine!
the long and wondrous journeys
still to be ours.

Mary Oliver from What Do We Know (2002)

Loving the World

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Pasture, Conestoga, Ontario

Messenger    by Mary Oliver

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

Summer Sabbath

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These are words from a prose poem from Rev. Kathleen McTigue, minister to the Unitarian Society of New Haven, Connecticut.

Summer Sabbath

Go someplace you haven’t seen before,
where no one knows you, where you don’t think twice
about what to wear, how you look, or who might be watching
as you let your body ease out into the sun and bask, lazy as a cat.

Untether yourself from the engines of busyness, one by one —
laptop, desktop, wristwatch, scribbled lists,
even the telephone,
especially the one you carry everywhere,
the little tyrant.
This will all feel unnatural
but it’s not.
*

Go and don’t think about time:
how much you’ve got left,
how to pass, fill, use or spend it,
whether you might accidentally lose or waste it…

Instead, consider your life —
who you love and why,
how blessed you are to be here, resting
under a shower of birdsong…

You might ponder these things, but you could also let
the whole creaking apparatus of thought come to a halt.
You might surrender, and let the world spill in
through the five gates,
no sentry standing watch,
no one left to resist or defend.

The innermost courtyard stands empty…
a clear fountain singing at the centre.

Scott Fountain Detail

Scott Fountain Detail (Photo credit: Maia C)

The Immense Vocabulary

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Being Still by Margaret Hasse

She’s a quiet clapper in the bell of the prairie,
a girl who likes to be alone.
Today, she’s hiked four miles down
ravines’ low cool blueness.
Bending under a barbed wire, she’s in grass fields.
She’s at the edge of the great plains.
Wise to openness, she finds it a familiar place.
Her clothes swell like wheat bread.

When she returns to her parents house,
the foxtails and burrs have come home, too.
The plants seem intent on living in new ground.
She’s the carrier.  “Carrier” is a precision
learned in summer’s biology class.
She likes to think of ripening seeds,
a cargo inside the bellies of flying birds.
Birds like the red-winged blackbirds who skim the air
and land, alert on their cattail stalks.
They allow her a silent manner.
They go about their red-winged business
of crying to each other, dipping their beaks
into the swampy stand of ditch water,
full of the phantom of green.
The stiller she is, the more everything moves
in the immense vocabulary of being.

learn the flowers

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Gary Snyder, buddhist, environmentalist, pulitzer prize winning poet, wrote one of my favourite poems.  I love the long vision, and the simple yet so deeply, deeply important  instructions at the end.  It speaks to me of Unitarian Universalism: community, nature, light.

For the Children

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

Among the Trees

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When I Am Among the Trees

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness,
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

~ Mary Oliver ~

Pine in Algonquin Park