Veni Veni

And none too soon.

Veni Veni

Veni, veni, Emmanuel;
captivum solve Israel,
qui gemit in exilio,
privatus Dei Filio.

O come, O come, Emmanuel;
and ransom captive Israel,
that mourns in lonely exile here
until the Son of God appear.

Gaude! Gaude!
Emmanuel nascetur pro te, Israel.

Rejoice! Rejoice!
Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.

Veni, veni, O Oriens;
solare nos adveniens,
noctis depelle nebulas,
dirasque noctis tenebras.

O come, thou Day-star, come and cheer
our spirits by thine advent here;
disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
and death's dark shadows put to flight.

Veni, Clavis Davidica!
Regna reclude caelica;
fac iter tutum superum,
et claude vias inferum.

O come, thou Key of David, come,
and open wide our heavenly home;
make safe the way that leads to thee,
and close the path to misery.

Veni, veni, Adonai!
Qui populo in Sinai,
legem dedisti vertice,
in maiestate gloriae.

O come to lead us, Adonai,
who to the tribes on height of Sinai
in ancient times did'st give the Law,
in cloud, and majesty and awe.

Gaude! Gaude!
Emmanuel nascetur pro te, Israel.

Moods

(photo courtesy of flickr user Tomsch)

Moods
by Sara Teasdale

I am the still rain falling,
Too tired for singing mirth --
Oh, be the green fields calling,
Oh, be for me the earth!

I am the brown bird pining
To leave the nest and fly --
Oh, be the fresh cloud shining,
Oh, be for me the sky!

They Say It Can't Be Done

I must admit that I directly and intentionally plagiarized one of the best poets I know in this piece, my dear friend Laura. Her Venn diagram image has stuck with me ever since I first read it in one of her poems.

An additional note on this poem: it is not personal. That is, I am talking about no specific person, although it was inspired by recent events. A good man I have never met died last night, and this poem partially expresses my grief that I will not (until heaven) get to learn from him or thank him for some of the greatest blessings ever to touch my life. 


(courtesy, flickr user *~Uplifting Arts~*)

They Say It Can't Be Done

There is nothing to connect our souls.
Not a rope, not a strand, not one fiber
that by tugging both our hearts may be pulled.
Our circles do not Venn-like overlap.
My friends know nothing of your friends.
and your mother does not know mine.
Our cities were built centuries apart.
The Zodiac sets us directly opposite.
It snowed when you were born;
it rained over me.

We are wholly separate.
And yet my soul cannot help
but fit inside yours, convex to concave.
But there is nothing to meld us
until I remember the grand order of things.
There are two threads.
We can start here, and move from here.
Just two, and in the midst of them
I stake my justified love for you.

Two things:
You see the sun.
I see the sun.
You see the moon.
I see the moon.

(c.l.)

Helpless

helpless

caught in a cube of music
nose pressed to the transparent
wall of a world of dissonance
ears fastened to the porous
surface to hear screams surrounding
fingers touched to tears smeared
over the glass in hopes the drops
will quench the outer dust
hands sliding down condensation
clasping at cracked and empty
palms on the other side
feet kicking the base frantic
to walk beside the soles pulling
chains across the desert

(c.l.)

After Reading the 24th Chapter...

Fear has always been the demon on my shoulder, affecting even the way I view God and his wrath and judgment. I wrote this poem after thinking on these things.

After Reading the 24th Chapter of the Gospel of Matthew

Lord God,
promise us that the end of all days
will be like giving birth to a child.
That after the bloodshed,
labor pain racking, skin tearing,
mother and infant screaming,
the chaos of humans revolving,
we shall indeed not perish.
Promise us that in the end
you will wash us clean,
swath us in righteousness,
and lay us in the bend
of an omnipotent arm that
deals mercy more swiftly than justice;
that you will whisper quietness to us,
peace into our cramped souls,
breath into our new bodies,
and raise us in the light of your coming,
eyes blinking wide into fresh luminescence;
birth pains and groanings forgotten,
the judgment past, love evolving, and
everlasting life in our bones.

(c.l.)

The Dance

I wrote this for a dear friend.

The Dance

I love to dance with you.
That is, to talk with you.
Because every conversation with you
is a dance.

We both know the steps.
Your left to my right.
Your back to my forward.

We both know the missteps.
My foot on yours.
Your hand not in mine.

It is the knowing that is dear to me.
Most people must first learn the dance;
how to turn tongues and minds together 
as well as arms, how to move in unison, 
                          move forward,
move back.

We know the dance.
We are paired well.
I know your hesitations.
You know my abstractions.

                          Move forward,
move back.

Love Is A Flower In Your Hand

(taken today)

There Comes the Strangest Moment

There Comes the Strangest Moment
by Kate Light

There comes the strangest moment in your life,
when everything you thought before breaks free--
what you relied upon, as ground-rule and as rite
looks upside down from how it used to be.

Skin's gone pale, your brain is shedding cells;
you question every tenet you set down;
obedient thoughts have turned to infidels
and every verb desires to be a noun.

I want--my want. I love--my love. I'll stay
with you. I thought transitions were the best,
but I want what's here to never go away.
I'll make my peace, my bed, and kiss this breast…

Your heart's in retrograde. You simply have no choice.
Things people told you turn out to be true.
You have to hold that body, hear that voice.
You'd have sworn no one knew you more than you.

How many people thought you'd never change?
But here you have. It's beautiful. It's strange.

When one has lived a long time alone

by Galway Kinnell

When one has lived a long time alone,
and the hermit thrush calls and there is an answer,
and the bullfrog head half out of water utters
the cantillations he sang in his first spring,
and the snake lowers himself over the threshold
and creeps away among the stones, one sees
they all live to mate with their kind, and one knows,
after a long time of solitude, after the many steps taken
away from one's kind, toward these other kingdoms,
the hard prayer inside one's own singing
is to come back, if one can, to one's own,
a world almost lost, in the exile that deepens,
when one has lived a long time alone.

Autumn Day

(Japanese Maple, taken today)

Autumn Day
by Rainer Maria Rilke

Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.
Lay your shadow on the sundials
and let loose the wind in the fields.

Bid the last fruits to be full;
give them another two more southerly days,
press them to ripeness, and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now will not build one anymore.
Whoever is alone now will remain so for a long time,
will stay up, read, write long letters,
and wander the avenunes, up and down,
restlessly, while the leaves are blowing.

Half Acre

(photo courtesy of simonk on flickr)

A song this time. It has enchanted me.

Half Acre
by Hem, from Rabbit Songs

I am holding half an acre
Torn from the map of Michigan
And folded in this scrap of paper
Is the land I grew in

Think of every town you've lived in
Every room you lay your head
And what is it that you remember?

Do you carry every sadness with you?
Every hour your heart was broken
Every night the fear and darkness
Lay down with you?

A man is walking on the highway
A woman stares out at the sea
And light is only now just breaking

So we carry every sadness with us
Every hour our hearts were broken
Every night the fear and darkness
Lay down with us

But I am holding half an acre
Torn from the map of Michigan
I am carrying this scrap of paper

That can crack the darkest sky wide open
Every burden taken from me
Every night my heart unfolding
My home

The Poet

The Poet
by Tom Wayman

Loses his position on worksheet or page in textbook
May speak much but makes little sense
Cannot give clear verbal instructions
Does not understand what he reads
Does not understand what he hears
Cannot handle “yes-no” questions

Has great difficulty interpreting proverbs
Has difficulty recalling what he ate for breakfast, etc.
Cannot tell a story from a picture
Cannot recognize visual absurdities

Has difficulty classifying and categorizing objects
Has difficulty retaining such things as
addition and subtraction facts, or multiplication tables
May recognize a word one day and not the next

After Reading Tu Fu...

And then I found my summer poem.


(photo courtesy of evissa on flickr)

After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard
by Charles Wright

East of me, west of me, full summer.

How deeper than elsewhere the dusk is in your own yard.

Birds fly back and forth across the lawn

                                     looking for home

As night drifts up like a little boat.



Day after day, I become of less use to myself.

Like this mockingbird,

                   I flit from one thing to the next.

What do I have to look forward to at fifty-four?

Tomorrow is dark.

              Day-after-tomorrow is darker still.



The sky dogs are whimpering.

Fireflies are dragging the hush of evening

                                       up from the damp grass.

Into the world's tumult, into the chaos of every day,

Go quietly, quietly.

Coffee & Dolls

A poem I found while searching for the keyword "summer" on The Academy of American Poets website.


(photo courtesy of SeenyaRita on Flickr)

Coffee & Dolls
by April Bernard

It was a storefront for a small-time numbers runner,
pretending to be some sort of grocery. Coffeemakers
and Bustello cans populated the shelves, sparsely.
Who was fooled. The boxes bleached in the sun,
the old guys sat inside on summer lawn chairs,
watching tv. The applause from the talk shows and game shows
washed out the propped-open door like distant rain.

It closed for a few months. The slick sedan disappeared.
One spring day, it reopened, and this time a sign
decorated the window: COFFEE & DOLLS.
Yarn-haired, gingham-dressed floppy dolls
lolled among the coffee cans. A mastiff puppy,
the size and shape of a tipped-over fire hydrant,
guarded as the sedan and the old guys returned.

I don't know about you, but I've been looking
for a narrative in which suffering makes sense.
I mean, the high wail of the woman holding her dead child,
the wail that filled the street. I mean the sudden
fatal blooms on golden skin. I mean the crack deaths,
I mean the ice-cream truck that cruised the alphabets
and sold crack to the same deedle-dee-dee tune as fudgsicles.
I mean the raw scabs of the beaten mastiff, and many other
things.

Waking Up In The Greenhouse

Waking Up In The Greenhouse

Everyone should know what it is
to be ushered into morning
by warm sun and cool water,
clear sky and the jades and the olives
of this house of green and silver.

The birds wide awake with beating wings.
The farmers shoveling sweet feed to the cows.
The brightest flowers born in the gentle sun.
The softest sky and the fairy breeze.

All of these things ease me into wakefulness,
teaching me to take life at its own rhythm,
as slow-coming and certain-eyed as the dawn.

(c.l.)

Logos

Logos
by Mary Oliver

Why wonder about the loaves and the fishes?
If you say the right words, the wine expands.
If you say them with love
and the felt ferocity of that love
and the felt necessity of that love,
the fish explode into many.
Imagine him, speaking,
and don't worry about what is reality,
or what is plain, or what is mysterious.
If you were there, it was all those things.
If you can imagine it, it is all those things.
Eat, drink, be happy.
Accept the miracle.
Accept, too, each spoken word
spoken with love.

Winds

Winds

We do not understand
the high winds on hot days.
They froth the tops of the trees into waves,
letting us drown on the stifling ocean floor,
and we glare up in righteous indignation.
The wind is conversing with the maples
and we cannot hear what they are saying.

We understand the low winds.
They were sent from heaven for our comfort.
They clothe our skin in coolness,
and we sway into them as we do
into fur coats in snowfalls.
How pleasant the weather is today, we say,
how kind of the winds to descend to us.

We understand nothing.
We do not know that the winds pay us no heed.
The high winds laugh with the forest
at the joy of the sky;
they rage at something terrible
that happened across the sea.

And when we stand in the low winds,
assuming they blow to please us,
we have no idea that we are ignorant flies
in the presence of two lovers.
For the low wind bows to greet the earth,
reminding her in the wake
of his mighty jet streams and trade winds
that he knows gentleness.
That as she spins her sphere
of jade and azure through the crystaled heavens,
he knows her dust and pebbles
as well as her seas and sky.

(c.l.)

The Cities Inside Us

The Cities Inside Us
by Alberto Rios

We live in secret cities
And we travel unmapped roads.

We speak words between us that we recognize
But which cannot be looked up.

They are our words.
They come from very far inside our mouths.

You and I, we are the secret citizens of the city
Inside us, and inside us

There go all the cars we have driven
And seen, there are all the people

We know and have known, there
Are all the places that are

But which used to be as well. This is where
They went. They did not disappear.

We each take a piece
Through the eye and through the ear.

It's loud inside us, in there, and when we speak
In the outside world

We have to hope that some of that sound
Does not come out, that an arm

Not reach out
In place of the tongue.

How do I love thee?

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I don't even care if it's cliched. It is the best there is.



How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

After Years

I love this poem. It has inspired a couple of my own. I still need to buy Kooser's prize-winning book Delights and Shadows. I believe he was the U.S. poet laureate before Billy Collins.

After Years
by Ted Kooser

Today, from a distance, I saw you
walking away, and without a sound
the glittering face of a glacier
slid into the sea. An ancient oak
fell in the Cumberlands, holding only
a handful of leaves, and an old woman
scattering corn to her chickens looked up
for an instant. At the other side
of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times
the size of our own sun exploded
and vanished, leaving a small green spot
on the astronomer's retina
as he stood on the great open dome
of my heart with no one to tell.