Sunday Poems - W.H. Auden

No, it's not Sunday. Yes, life is a little bit crazy right now with on-call shifts, final CPE evaluations to write, and a whole bunch of other good but busy-making stuff. So here's a poem. Because it is dear to my heart, and so are you.

"As I Walked Out One Evening"

As I walked out one evening,
    Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
    Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
    I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
    "Love has no ending.

"I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
    Till China and Afica meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
    And the salmon sing in the street.

"I'll love you till the ocean
    Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
    Like geese about the sky.

"The years shall run like rabbits,
    For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
    And the first love of the world."

But all the clocks in the city
    Began to whirr and chime:
"O let not Time deceive you
    You cannot conquer Time.

"In the burrows of the Nightmare
    Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
    And coughs when you would kiss.

"In headaches and in worry
    Vaguely life leaks away,
And time will have his fancy
    To-morrow or to-day.

"Into many a green valley
    Drifts the appalling snow
Time breaks the threaded dances
    And the diver's brilliant bow.

"O plunge your hands in water
    Plunge them up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
    And wonder what you've missed."

"The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
    The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
    A lane to the land of the dead.

"Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
    And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer
    And Jill goes down on her back."

"O look, look in the mirror,
    O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
    Although you cannot bless."

"O stand, stand at the window
    As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbor
    With your crooked heart."

It was late, late in the evening
    The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
    And the deep river ran on.

--W.H. Auden

Sunday poems - A Song for Simeon

I'm working as a hospice chaplain these days.

It can be very, very sad.

It can also be joyful in some strange ways, helping to usher people from life to death, from this world to the next; trying to help people find comfort and peace in the living as they prepare to die.

I came across this T.S. Eliot poem the other day that speaks to the end of life in a way nothing else I've come across does. It's a reference to Simeon, the old man at the temple who spoke to Mary and Joseph and their brand-new baby, Jesus. He had waited all his life to see the Messiah, and the Messiah had come.

I know it's not Sunday, but here's the poem.

"A Song for Simeon"
by T.S. Eliot

Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and
The winter sun creeps by the snow hills;
The stubborn season has made stand.
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.
Dust in sunlight and memory in corners
Wait for the wind that chills toward the dead land.

Grant us thy peace.
I have walked many years in this city,
Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor,
Have given and taken honour and ease.
There went never any rejected from my door.

Who shall remember my house, where shall live my children's children
When the time of sorrow is come?
They will take to the goat's path, and the fox's home,
Fleeing from foreign faces and the foreign swords.

Before the time of cords and scourges and lamentation
Grant us thy peace.
Before the stations of the mountain of desolation,
Before the certain hour of maternal sorrow,
Now at this birth season of decease,
Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word,
Grant Israel's consolation
To one who has eighty years and no to-morrow.

According to thy word.
They shall praise Thee and suffer in every generation
With glory and derision,
Light upon light, mounting the saints' stair.
Not for me the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and prayer,
Not for me the ultimate vision.
Grant me thy peace.
(And a sword shall pierce thy heart,
Thine also.)
I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me,
I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.
Let thy servant depart,
Having seen thy salvation.

Sunday poems - "Another Reason I Don't Keep a Gun in the House"

I do love Billy Collins.

I posted on Facebook over a week ago about how the barking dog in our neighborhood is driving me  insane. He barks from 5:30am to 9:30am, nonstop, at about one-second intervals. Bark. Bark. Bark. Bark. Like a doggy metronome. Then, at 9:30am exactly, he stops. It's a mystery to me what he's on about and why he stops, but I would just love for him to knock it the heck off.

Of course, as of tomorrow I'll be getting up at 6am to go to work, so the dog will only cost me half an hour of sleep instead of the two or three he's been costing me lately.


My friend Melody reminded me of this poem to help me cope with the woofing madness.

I do so love Billy Collins.

"Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House"
Billy Collins


The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark

that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.


The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking


and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.

Thanks to www.sunyulster.edu for the picture of Billy Collins.

Sunday poems - "Infirmity"

Sandi, a longtime friend of my family and an incredible woman of faith, passed away from cancer last week. Yesterday my mom went to her funeral, and spent part of the day with Sandi's husband and three school-aged kids.

Her death has made me reflective about many things. As her husband Brian wrote in an email sent to all of her friends and family - "cancer was the little 'c' in Sandi's life; Christ was the big 'C'." She had cancer for eight years, and was hopeful, loving, and active throughout those years, despite her diagnosis.

I miss her. My family will miss her. Many people around the country and the world will miss her. The first time I got an email signed just "Brian," and not "Brian and Sandi," it hit me that she is really gone.

I won't belabor things here - for those of you who didn't know her, this is abstract. For those of you who did, there are better and more beautiful tributes on her CaringBridge website. But I did want to post a Sunday poem here, in her memory, and in the spirit of faith in Jesus in which she lived her life.

"Infirmity" - Theodore Roethke

In purest song one plays the constant fool As changes shimmer in the inner eye. I stare and stare into a deepening pool And tell myself my image cannot die. I love myself: that’s my one constancy. Oh, to be something else, yet still to be! Sweet Christ, rejoice in my infirmity; There’s little left I care to call my own. Today they drained the fluid from a knee And pumped a shoulder full of cortisone; Thus I conform to my divinity By dying inward, like an aging tree. The instant ages on the living eye; Light on its rounds, a pure extreme of light Breaks on me as my meager flesh breaks down— The soul delights in that extremity. Blessed the meek; they shall inherit wrath; I’m son and father of my only death. A mind too active is no mind at all; The deep eye sees the shimmer on the stone; The eternal seeks, and finds, the temporal, The change from dark to light of the slow moon, Dead to myself, and all I hold most dear, I move beyond the reach of wind and fire. Deep in the greens of summer sing the lives I’ve come to love. A vireo whets its bill. The great day balances upon the leaves; My ears still hear the bird when all is still; My soul is still my soul, and still the Son, And knowing this, I am not yet undone. Things without hands take hands: there is no choice,— Eternity’s not easily come by. When opposites come suddenly in place, I teach my eyes to hear, my ears to see How body from spirit slowly does unwind Until we are pure spirit at the end.

Sunday poems - "Let Evening Come"

I haven't kept up with my Sunday poems, but I'm determined to do better. I love running across a new poem or poet.

I fell in love with this poet my first year of seminary. I took a class with Dr. Donald Capps called "Poetry and the Care of Souls," about the place of poetry in pastoral care. It was incredible, and there I fell in love with several poets who were new to me - Billy Collins, Donald Hall, and Louise Gluck, to name just a few. A poet who Daryl and I both immediately fell in love with in that class was Jane Kenyon. In fact, we named our second kitty after her (though the kitty's a boy) because we've started a habit of naming our cats after poets. Cats are quite poetical animals, if you think about it.

Jane Kenyon's poetry is simple and beautiful, full of images of nature and ordinary life. She struggled with depression throughout her life, so I'm reconnecting with her poetry as I write my final paper for my second class with Dr. Capps - "Ministry and Mental Illness." It seems right, somehow, to begin and end my time in seminary with such a wonderful professor and with such a wonderful poet.

This is the poem I'm citing in the final paper I'm writing on pastoral care and Alzheimer's disease. It comes back to me when I'm at the end of something - an internship, a summer, a graduate school program. In times of transition, even if that transition is hard sad, God does not leave us.

"Let Evening Come"

by Jane Kenyon

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

On Slow Learning

On Slow Learning

by Scott Cairns

If you have ever owned

a tortoise, you already know

how terribly difficult

paper training can be

for some pets.

Even if you get so far 

as to instill in your tortoise

the value of achieving the paper,

there remains an obstacle--

your tortoise's intrinsic sloth.

Even a well-intentioned tortoise

may find himself, in his journeys,

to be painfully far from the mark.

Failing, your tortoise may shy away

for weeks within his shell, utterly

ashamed, or looking up with tiny,

wet eyes might offer an honest shrug.

Forgive him.

Sunday Poems - Billy Collins's "Marginalia"

I've decided to post a favorite, thought-provoking, or just plain fun poem here each Sunday. Today's inaugural poem is "Marginalia" by Billy Collins, a wonderful, wonderful poem that only gets better when read aloud. Enjoy!

Marginalia - Billy Collins

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."