Category Archives: poetry

Songs of Ascent

church, Lent, poetry
lazarus_miracle_icon_sinai_12th_century
Lazarus is raised

I’ve been trying through a few calendar cycles to write something about our Orthodox Lenten services on Wednesday evenings, and I almost gave up. But I have to say that they are the most soul-nourishing and sweet times, and maybe my favorite part of Lent. It took me several years to become familiar enough with the format to be able to settle down and receive this great blessing the Church has given us to facilitate repentance.

“O taste and see that the Lord is good….” This refrain is repeated many times to the quieter tones of these midweek services that are designed to sustain our souls and bodies with spiritual food as we make our journey to Pascha.

And the Songs of Ascent! These Psalms (120-134) have always been my favorites, from the Jesus People days when we sang so many of them to folk tunes. The words lodged themselves in my heart accompanied by visions of the Hebrews walking for days to the Holy City on pilgrimage to one of the major Jewish feasts. They are read in their entirety every weekday at Vespers during about the first half of Lent, and I can think about how I am on my way, too, to the feast of feasts, The Resurrection of Christ, Pascha. Now we are only a week away from Lazarus Saturday, and a different section of the book of Psalms is set for Vespers, but I will still meditate on this one from last week:

O Lord, My heart is not exalted,

Neither are my eyes raised up;

Neither am I carried along in great things,

Nor in things too marvelous for me.

If I were not humble-minded,

But exalted my soul,

Like a child weaned from his mother,

So you would reward my soul.

Let Israel hope in the Lord

From this present time and unto the ages.

Psalm 131

The Tide in the River

nature, poetry

A short verse stuck in my mind over 20 years ago, and has been playing there off and on out of a proper context. I’m pretty sure it came to me in a book of poems for children, and somewhere along the way I incorrectly connected it with Longfellow; when recently I searched around online for a while I found that the author is Eleanor Farjeon.

Only once that I can remember did the meaning fit with the situation, when I was with my dear husband on a short getaway to celebrate our wedding anniversary. We were staying in the company town of Scotia in way-northern California, where the sawmill is built near the Eel River.

After dinner we walked in the dark around the village of Rio Dell close by, and on our way back to the hotel stopped on the bridge to lean over the rail; we listened to the quiet flowing noise and could barely make out the stream down below. Here was the right time and place, and the verse very nimbly popped into my mind, and I recited:

The tide in the river,
The tide in the river,
The tide in the river runs deep.
I saw a shiver
Pass over the river
As the tide turned in its sleep.

         –Eleanor Farejon

Now we’re celebrating that blessed day once more, but we’re driving to California’s Central Coast this time for our little vacation, to the town of Cambria where we spent part of our honeymoon and which we haven’t visited since. Maybe we’ll go to the beach this time. Let me see, do I know any beach-y verse I could get ready?

A breathing.

nature, poetry, , , ,

THE END OF SLEEP

The eyes are about to open.
Through fog, Sleep crosses the great water—
See how it sails in the little boat?
Slowly, such a long journey,
Bits of light
Catch colors in the mirrored hull.
Beneath the glassy surface, a glimpse
Of your dreams: the lake, the boat, with you
In it. Now a shadow
Falls over you: above the surface,
The figure of Sleep
Has leaned over its boat.
Hear Sleep’s feet plop in the shallows—
It pulls the boat to shore.

— Elizabeth Twiddy

This morning as I neared the shore of full consciousness, what I saw through the fog was myself, getting dressed and going to church for a Presanctified Liturgy. I was full of happy anticipation. Then I pulled the blinds open and was surprised to see, not the sunny and warm skies of the last few days, but thick and cold white fog.

I’ve read many people who say they love the fog, and I thought of them right away, wondering why I couldn’t be like them. Then I remembered the foggy days of my childhood when in the winter the damp cold would settle over California’s Central Valley like a perverse blanket. Not your normal blanket that makes you cozy, but something more like a conduit of chill. My fifth-grade teacher Mrs. Wicks, who came from South Dakota, said she was never so miserable in the dry winters of her youth as she was in our “temperate” weather that froze her to the bone.

The natural and normal tule fog that emerges from the ground after the first winter rains became a dangerous foe once I learned to drive and became aware of all the car crashes on the highways that are a frequent accompaniment to the season. I became familiar with the stiff neck you get peering intently through the wall of white trying not to run into something.

But this morning in March, all of that is far behind me, and for the Valley-dwellers it is likely passed as well by this time of year. So I thought I would look for a poem by one of those fog-lovers. The fog that’s outside my window is still a little too cold for my old bones to thoroughly enjoy, but I’m working on it. After all, it’s another part of our earthly home that is filled with the breath of God.

THE BREATHING

An absolute
patience.
Trees stand
up to their knees in
fog. The fog
slowly flows
uphill.
White
cobwebs, the grass
leaning where deer
have looked for apples.
The woods
from brook to where
the top of the hill looks
over the fog send up
not one bird.
So absolute, it is
no other than
happiness itself, a breathing
too quiet to hear.

~ Denise Levertov

On the ground with the White Horse.

history, poetry, travel,


Last week The Garners posted about G.K. Chesterton’s Ballad of the White Horse, which caused me to dig out my cassette tapes of the author reading his own poem — how thrilling! Too bad they were made from a scratchy recording so that it’s very hard to appreciate the poem itself. Still, the directness of the connection to the very voice and person of the poet mean a lot to me.

What made me interested in the Ballad in the first place was taking a trip to Britain with daughter Pippin nine years ago. We both very much wanted to see White Horse Hill in Uffington while we were there, and we found it quite empty of any other humans the day we visited. We hiked up the hill to the chalk art that is thought to be 2,000 to 3,000 years old, and wandered around the horse’s anatomy. We couldn’t pull ourselves away. I just could not get over — here it is again — the earthy material link to ancient peoples and the mysteries of their culture and history.

One thing we share with the ancient people who carved the trenches of this design is human nature, the gifts of the Creator who made us in His image, glorious even in a tarnished condition. The horse reveals the creative aspect of that image, and Chesterton’s ballad shows his own artistry while it tells a human and Christian tale set in King Alfred’s day. The imagery in this stanza, which I think pertinent to the Lenten season, illuminates another aspect of our humanity that we share with our ancestors: the impulse to stand before God in worship, fighting with the desire to be God:

Pride juggles with her toppling towers,
They strike the sun and cease,
But the firm feet of humility
They grip the ground like trees.

–G.K. Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse                 

Thinking again about this world history and my history, I want to revisit the horse vicariously, by means of the poem slightly more removed from the poet than my old cassettes. So I just ordered this edition of the book, which I think is the one I bought two copies of in the past for gifts. The American Chesterton Society will be sending me this CD, read by Aidan Mackey, who sounds as though he is very likely, once I put that disk in the player, to send me right back to England and White Horse Hill.
[update: the recording was annoyingly scratchy and almost as bad as the old one of GKC himself. 😦  ]

Linking up to Weekends With Chesterton