easter poems

Every Riven Thing

God goes, belonging to every riven thing he's made
sing his being simply by being
the thing it is:
stone and tree and sky, 

man who sees and sings and wonders why

God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he's made,
means a storm of peace.
Think of the atoms inside the stone.
Think of the man who sits alone
trying to will himself into a stillness where

God goes belonging. To every riven thing he's made
there is given one shade
shaped exactly to the thing itself:
under the tree a darker tree;
under the man the only man to see

God goes belonging to every riven thing. He's made
the things that bring him near,
made the mind that makes him go.
A part of what man knows,
apart from what man knows,

God goes belonging to every riven thing he's made.

-Christian Wiman

~

Pharaoh's Cross

It would be easier to be an atheist; it is the simple way out.
But each time I turn toward that wide and welcoming door
it slams shut in my face, and I - like my forebears - Adam, Eve -
am left outside the garden of reason and limited, chill science
and the arguments of intellect.
Who is this wild cherubim who whirls the flaming sword
'twixt the door to the house of atheism and me?

Sometimes in the groping dark of my not knowing
I am exhausted with the struggle to believe in you, O God.
Your ways are not our ways. Your ways are extraordinary.
You sent evil angels to the Egyptians and killed;
you killed countless babes in order that Pharaoh,
whose heart was hardened by you (that worries me, Lord)
might be slow to let the Hebrew children go.
You turned back the waters of the Red Sea
and your Chosen People went through on dry land
and the Egyptians were drowned, men with wives and children,
young men with mothers and fathers (your ways are not our ways)
and there was much rejoicing at all this death,
and the angels laughed and sang, and you stopped them, saying,
"How can you sing when my children are drowning?"

When your people reached Mount Sinai you warned Moses
not to let any of them near you lest you break forth
on them with death in your hand.

You are Love, and you command us to love,
and yet you yourself turn men's hearts to evil,
and you wipe out nations with one sweep of the hand -
the Amorites and the Hittites and the Peruzzites -
gone, all gone. It seems that any means will do, and yet -
all these things are but stories told about you by fallen man,
part of the story (for your ways are not our ways)
but not the whole story. You are our author,
and we try to listen to what you say,
but we suffer from faulty hearing and loss of language
and we get the words wrong.

Listen: you came to us as one of us
and lived with us and died for us and descended into hell for us
and burst out into life for us:

Do you now hold Pharaoh in your arms?

-Madeleine L'Engle

~

My God my bright abyss
Into which all my longing will not go
Once more I come to the edge of all I know
And believing nothing believe in this:

-Christian Wiman

11/25/14

There are leaf-stains on the sidewalk this morning

from the rain last night, little brown memories, little
ghosts, little impressionistic paintings on the concrete,

the leaves themselves all gone. The trees are bare.
In a day, or two, or five, nothing will be left.

This is a metaphor, of course. It’s heavy-handed, true,

but Ferguson is refusing to be turned into a poem
and so the options are limited. The leaves are
the bodies, obviously. Trayvon, Michael. Tamir, Eric, John.

Michael Brown’s body lay in the street for hours

and whatever mark he made on the asphalt is long
since gone, his family left with memories, ghosts,

impressionistic paintings of an eighteen-year-long life.

The life itself all gone. Can you see the poem

begin to unfold? It is autumn. The leaves are falling.

Can you see, also, the limits of metaphor? Let me

speak plainly: these deaths were not inevitable.

They were not leaves scheduled to fall before winter.

The stains these bodies made on the sidewalks
and roads and autopsy tables were not art.

The sky is grey, heavy with snow. Michael Brown
was shot dead in August. Walking down the street.
Eighteen years old. Michael Brown is refusing

to be turned into a poem. There is nothing left to say.

13 years later

Thirteen Years Later

Theology pushes us towards silence,

Peter said,

or wrote, rather, at some point during his years in

Baghdad. This would have been some time before

the year he played a recording of the adhan in class,

the year he stood -- or sat, more likely -- at the front

of the classroom and said he thought Arabic would be

a beautiful language to do theology in. I didn’t know

enough, then, to wonder at the way language fails.

I didn’t think about how maybe he was out of

words. I was eighteen years old, that first year

he was my teacher.

Ahlan wa-sahlan,

Louis coached us, bouncing up on the balls of his feet,

smiling at a semester’s worth of garbled consonants

tripping up against the dreaded ayin. It should be

the most beautiful letter, he told us, made us repeat words

after him again and again until the sounds had

lost all meaning.

It was two years after I came home,

two years after I walked the streets of Damascus

every day for a month, two years after I climbed the stairs

to the monastery an hour outside the city limits

before I learned that Father Paolo had disappeared.

Presumed dead, the report stated quietly, executed

by Syrian rebels.

You are writing the same poem

again and again, my poetry professor told me that spring.

I was ten years old when the towers fell. The neighbor kids

all gathered in my backyard, like usual, except this time we knelt

in a circle and James led us in the Lord’s prayer.

… as we forgive those who trespass against us …

No, I don’t understand any of it: twenty-three and still a child.

Who were the men who hijacked the planes, I wonder.

What were they like, as children?

There is no room here for naïveté.

I have seen the photographs of people jumping from the windows,

twenty floors above the ground, and yet --

Dialogue is an exercise in beauty,

Father Paolo said. His whole face changed when he smiled;

his eyes disappeared into slits before the force of his joy, crow’s feet

turning into deep creases. I want to believe he might be right;

even then,

even now.