A Poem to Inspire Each Day.
Thank you
for coming: thank
you for coming along:
the sun’s bright:
the wind rocks the
naked trees
so long.
A.R. Ammons
An early finish to the year, and to the natureandfaith poetry blog for technical reasons. But I’ve loved the journey. Thank you for reading.
Magdalene
The spirit has shifted, my body remains
in its old place. Pain overtakes me
to last as long as my body is growing.
Now I can give it food from the spirit
where before there was only hunger.
At times love aches: there are weeks, months, years.
Like the roots of a dry tree my tongue is dry
and the roof of my mouth. My lips are unpainted.
It takes long: Truth sounding out error.
But it is He who feels
the drought of the whole world, not I.
Karol Wojtyla
I met my friend as we walked by the shore,
Arm in arm with his lover,
Her white-gold hair flying and tracking the wind.
All four we trod at the turning year
On the shingle-shod ground. In my ear
Was the whip and roar of the shearing sea.
We crossed over the bridge of the harbour
With the sun at our back.
Ah, my husband,
Let me cup your face with my fingers
By the bright houses and the shouting children
Out on the land’s ledge, hung on time’s edge
Where Scorpio with her white arms
Flies up into the twilight,
Where the world’s great arc wheels
And the souls of the darkening boats
Hanker for the sea.
Hilary Davies
this fog
on cloud on snow is no less
than a blind spot in an absent
mind
crossing
out a figure
on an empty field no more
than one decimal place away, a
substance of a thing that has no
shadow but a yearlong full stop
rounding on and off December.
Kit Fan
He seized the day and shook it as it passed.
And so it passed and so he seized the night
and as he shook it cried I seized the night!
and so it passed.
He took an ancient play and moved the pieces
here and there until he’d made a play
about a man who took an ancient play
and moved the pieces.
It was his year, it was to be the year
it all took off, he had a brilliant spring
and wrote all summer of the brilliant spring
he had that year.
A song was playing which would always now
remind him of those days, when it came on
tonight he said it used to, whack it on
it doesn’t now.
I love it though, he said when it was done.
I always will and all the stars looked down
as they’ll be doing when you set this down
and that’s that done.
Glyn Maxwell
The Birth
All that needs to be done shall be done.
With the single star standing over,
Solemnity will attend upon the presentation
Of the treasures by the potentates.
Meanwhile, shepherds will blink awake
In the night, and a certain fearsome glory
Will lead them hurryingly down,
Stubbing their bleeding toes a they stumblingly go,
To a cow byre’s homely stink, where a bundled child
Will have the fine-wrought shells of its tiny ears
Cocked to multitudes in the God-gracious heavens above,
Which shall be daubed all over with singing.
Michael Glover
Before the Crib
Unprecedented warmth had kept the herd
out in the fields till Advent; I saw their breathing, mornings,
hover over them like a cloud; later I could hear
snuffling and jostling in the slatted shed, cumbersome
flesh confined, the occasional clang of iron like a deadened
bell ringing. Christmas, I knelt before the crib to see
the ox, watchful over the newly born who held, already,
both hands high in blessing; straw leaded from the patched roof,
Joseph stood, bland and painted, one arm broken off
at the elbow; I sniffed for the stench of cattle in cramped
spaces, finding it difficult to hold belief that here
is God’s handiwork, here eternity has crawled into restricted
times and places, closing the distances between divinity
and dearth, between the heavens and the run-down church;
I wanted everything to change, I was a child, longing,
but without the words to plead. Now I pray, out
of the tragedy that is the history of our endeavour, to find
eternity in the bones of time, malice and greed subsumed
in the outspread hands of the Christ, pray for faithfulness
beyond all guile, that we who are made of a yielding clay
may be, in deed, far more than we imagine.
John F. Deane
Christmas; the themes are exhausted.
Yet there is always room
on the heart for another
snowflake to reveal a pattern.
Love knocks with such frosted fingers.
I look out. In the shadow
of so vast a God I shiver, unable
to detect the child for the whiteness.
R.S. Thomas
The wooden-shouldered tree is wild and high,
it is a plane-tree lighted inwardly,
it imprisons the sun in a cloth of leaf.
That will escape from this world though,
the tree is deliberate, it is life,
it has a musty smell and a shadow.
Bigger breasted than birds, it is breathing,
hangs with a weightless weight on everything,
having considered the sun from time to time
which vanishes in incense and yellow light:
is as silent as fog, the winter gleam
of a small sun and the birds in their flight.
It is courageous and it is alive,
this tree is nine parts of what I believe:
freedom lies in the inward of nature,
and this tree is green fire in a world of trees,
catches blue air, is neither pure nor impure,
but is alive. It is alive and dies.
Peter Levi
A Labourer
Who can tell his years, for the winds have stretched
So tight the skin on the bare racks of bone
That his face is smooth, inscrutable as stone?
And when he wades in the brown bilge of earth
Hour by hour, or stoops to pull
The reluctant swedes, who can read the look
In the colourless eyes, as his back comes straight
Like an old tree lightened of the snow’s weight?
Is there love there, or hope, or any thought
For the frail form broken beneath his tread,
And the sweet pregnancy that yields his bread?
R.S.Thomas
Poetry, Nature and Faith 