Monthly Archives: November 2014

The Absence

poetry, ,

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Matt. 5:3

I liked the first poem I read by R.S. Thomas so well that I borrowed a collection of his poems from the library. It had some water damage already so I don’t worry about leaving it in the bathroom or reading it at the breakfast table, and I’ve been perusing it for a few weeks.

One doesn’t have to explore this book for very long to find that Thomas’s poetry is full of the feeling of coldness between us and God. Themes of harsh landscape and winter reappear, with lots of stone, stone, stone. My husband has been watching a TV detective series set in Wales and he commented that he would not want to live there, it looks so bleak. Maybe Thomas’s perspective is touched by the geography of his homeland.

This poem below is an example of this tone, though it’s not as painful as some of his verse that describes the alienation that is so common to the human experience. The last line relieves me with its hopeful turn and reminds me of what I’ve heard elsewhere: It’s only when we are truly empty of anything to offer God, and present ourselves humbly before Him, that He can speak to us, with His fullness that is silence, His presence that is His Word.

THE ABSENCE

It is this great absence
that is like a presence, that compels
me to address it without hope
of a reply. It is a room I enter

from which someone has just
gone, the vestibule for the arrival
of one who has not yet come.
I modernise the anachronism

of my language, but he is no more here
than before. Genes and molecules
have no more power to call
him up than the incense of the Hebrews

at their altars. My equations fail
as my words do. What resource have I
other than the emptiness without him of my whole
being, a vacuum he may not abhor?

— R.S. Thomas

wales stones
Bryn Cader Faner cairn in Wales

Poetry for Supper

poetry, writing

The metaphor of windows in this poem by R.S. Thomas I find to be brilliant. I know I have a lot of nerve writing about poetry, because I am fairly ignorant, and do not show myself to be a dedicated or persevering student of the art. I also don’t write it, though I wish I did, because I appreciate the economy of words and the respect for the language that a good poem demonstrates.

That is, when it serves as a window, a possible purpose of a poem that one of the “old poets” in Thomas’s poem mentions. From my limited experience, it seems that many poem-windows are only good for being in a window museum. Someone puts a variable amount of work and skill into a poem, and many times all they end up with is an artsy window frame that is indeed unique and an expression of the hopeful poet’s individuality, but has nothing to do with light. It may be interesting, it may have been fulfilling for the artist, but it completely fails as something useful to anyone else; it has no “beauty of function.”

Easy for me to say, who might be described by the last line of this poem, “glib with prose.” I do find it challenging to talk about poetry, but talking is always easier than writing it.

POETRY for SUPPER

‘Listen, now, verse should be as natural
As the small tuber that feeds on muck
And grows slowly from obtuse soil
To the white flower of immortal beauty.’

‘Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer
Said once about the long toil
That goes like blood to the poem’s making?
Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,
Limp as bindweed, if it break at all
Life’s iron crust. Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you’d build
Your verse a ladder.’

‘You speak as though
No sunlight ever surprised the mind
Groping on its cloudy path.’

‘Sunlight’s a thing that needs a window
Before it enter a dark room.
Windows don’t happen.’

So two old poets,
Hunched at their beer in the low haze
Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran
Noisily by them, glib with prose.

— R.S. Thomas

r.s. thomas_photo_large

St. John the Wonderworker

church, friends, ,

holy-virgin-cathedral-1 sfOur friends Mr. and Mrs. C drove Mr. Glad and me to San Francisco this morning for a visit to Holy Virgin Cathedral, the “Joy of All Who Sorrow.” We were going there for the same reason many people come from all over the world, to pray at the relics of St. John (Maximovitch) of Shanghai and San Francisco.

Strange as it may seem to find those cities sharing a place in the name of this saint, they form an outline of his fascinating and famous life. He was in particular famous to his many adopted children and flock of Orthodox, some of those who had settled in China years before his arrival after fleeing from the Bolsheviks. In 1949 as the Communists John-of-San-Francisco photo smilewere coming to power there he helped 5,000 of these expatriates to emigrate, eventually to the United States. Later still he established the cathedral in San Francisco where his incorrupt relics remain.

On our way there we told what stories we could remember about St. John. One thing he was famous for was ending up barefoot much of the time because he was always coming across someone who was without any footwear; again and again he would take his own off and give them away.

Fr. John was glorified (recognized as a saint by the Orthodox Church) in 1994, and is often called St. John the Wonderworker. It was a joy to visit this place — my third time — with our friends and pray together, some of us asking St. John’s prayers as well.

P1110790

We were the only ones in the church for quite a while, but as we were leaving we met some people coming in who were from Romania. The bishop in the group, it turns out, had served the liturgy at the canonization of St. John back in 1994! We were really pleased to meet someone who had such a special connection to the saint, and who was obviously thrilled to be visiting again.

P1110802Afterward we needed some lunch, so we followed the advice of the candle desk attendant at the cathedral and ate at a Russian restaurant called The Red Tavern that was also in that Richmond District neighborhood. We were the only people there, too, though from the name we half expected when we went through the door to see a group of Bolsheviks plotting in the back corner.

A young woP1110798man only recently from Ukraine was our waitress and we enjoyed talking to her and eating the wonderful food. I didn’t think that I liked Russian food much, but everything I tasted was superb: dark brown bread scented with caraway, fresh cabbage salad with golden raisins and tomatoes; thinly sliced fried potatoes; and barley-mushroom soup with a complex and rich flavor. We all shared some Polish poppy seed dessert that we could tell had marzipan in the filling. We cut the two pieces into two more and ate them off these pretty dishes that the waitress said were their “dessert plates.”P1110800The forecast had been for cold and foggy weather in San Francisco today, but the sun was shining on our day and we didn’t even need our sweaters. Also, in our souls, we felt the warmth of Christ and of our friendship.

Malachai 4:2 But for you who fear my name, the Sun of Righteousness shall rise with healing in his wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall.

A white veil of threads.

nature, quotes,

“Time marched on. Each day seemed long, each week short. It was already autumn. What is the salient characteristic of autumn? The spiders’ threads in the early morning frost. I am not thinking much of the circular networks, marvellous as these are, hung along the gate, but rather the threads that are strung across everything, so that if you bend down till your eye is level with the field you can see a white veil over the whole expanse. They are everywhere, on everything. ‘Do they drape the cannons in France?’ asked Mr Ralph Wightman, true poet, in a striking image, the other day. To look down at these things is like looking up at the stars — we are baffled by quantity.”

-John Stewart Collis in The Worm Forgives the Plough