Tag Archives: re-post

Prisoners in a thousand ways.

quotes, , ,

Metropolitan Anthony Bloom:

I remember something my grandmother told me when I was a child. She was talking to me about the Greek war of independence against Turkey…and she told the case of a soldier who, after the battle, in the dark night, called his lieutenant and cried: ‘Lieutenant, Lieutenant, I have taken a prisoner!’ — ‘Bring him here,’ answered the lieutenant.– ‘I can’t, he is holding me so tight,’ replied the soldier.

This seems absurd…and yet I have the impression that very often it is the situation in which we find ourselves with respect to the world when we who are prisoners of this world in a thousand ways — not so much outwardly as inwardly — think that we can transform it….

From God and Man

The milky way, and church bells.

poetry, prayer,

PRAYER (I)

Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth
Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tow’r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.

-George Herbert

A nipping day, a biting day.

poetry, winter,

The sun is shining,
but I added a wool blanket to my bedclothes
this winter morning.

 
Today’s a nipping day, a biting day;
In which one wants a shawl,
A veil, a cloak, and other wraps:
I cannot ope to everyone who taps,
And let the draughts come whistling thro’ my hall;
Come bounding and surrounding me,
Come buffeting, astounding me,
Nipping and clipping thro’ my wraps and all.

-Christina Rossetti

When winter is over.

poetry, winter, , ,

Last week it seemed that winter had just begun, but this evening a balmy wind blew in from I can’t imagine where, and made me think ahead to when actual winter will be over and gone. I offer this poem that makes reference to that point in the future, metaphorically:

A SHORT TESTAMENT

Whatever harm I may have done
In all my life in all your wide creation
If I cannot repair it
I beg you to repair it,

And then there are all the wounded
The poor the deaf the lonely and the old
Whom I have roughly dismissed
As if I were not one of them.
Where I have wronged them by it
And cannot make amends
I ask you
To comfort them to overflowing,

And where there are lives I may have withered around me,
Or lives of strangers far or near
That I’ve destroyed in blind complicity,
And if I cannot find them
Or have no way to serve them,

Remember them. I beg you to remember them

When winter is over
And all your unimaginable promises
Burst into song on death’s bare branches.

–Anne Porter