Today is brought to you in the simplicity of Haiku.
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We think it will never end.
But endings bring hope
of better things still to come.
Category: Waxing Poetic
Viral Dailies, Day 13
We’re already at day 13 in our daily postings for National Poetry Month! Time passes quickly when one’s mind isn’t just on its passing.
Here are three more fridge magnet poems by good friend and fellow poet, extraordinaire, Lesley-Anne Evans. You can also follow her on Instagram.
This installment is titled, “Small Prayers.”
Enjoy!
Viral Dailies, Easter…
Easter morning. A triptych of Easter poems I’ve composed over the years, “Morning, breath”, “After the tomb”, and “Death’s death.”
Most of us have heard the story. Now, we must learn again how to breath…
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Morning, breath
As morning reaches where only night had been,
dew once more settles on the brittle earth
and breath returns to one,
so all can breathe again.
After the tomb
When blood, still damp, soaked through
the sleeves of shrug-shoulder’d men,
did you cry for their laughter?
Were your accusers held in sleep
when Mary’s shaking hands
held fast your plundered feet?
How long before bewildered men
and doting women find again
their reasons for remonstrance?
Will a miracle suffice
to fill the gaps in minds too young
not to lust for proof?
Were the angels surprised
to find their silenced songs
reignited for their fittest subject?
Did you know these walls would
only remind you of this one, unending breath?
This one effortless act for one so bored of death?
Death’s death
Live! Live! Not one minute
more to solemnize the squaring truths
of the dark, exasperating. Exsanguinating.
The probing luminant, juggernaut
of dawn brought down as a quickening
shade of brilliance over the tar-black,
songless night – now gasping out
its own greying reminiscence.
Kicking against the goads, a denouement
of despair, decay’s quietus comes to mock.
But its voice is too dry now for anything more
than the androgynous whisper of a skeleton.
The bones rattle and try in vain to spark, to scare,
to survive the day, already here.
Death, this needy after-thought, this choking
wheeze of duskish, tight-lipp’d groaning –
it can no longer hunt, its legs are
broken, a dislocated shoulder no longer
suited to hefting hopelessness.
Spring! Spring! O antediluvian Spring! How
many are your salted children, lined up
outside your garden wall. Someone
has unchink’d the tangled gate and trodden new
footprints – fresh, ancient and deep – in the Virgin soil.
We come too, having hid ourselves in
the wisp of your blood-colour’d sleeves.
Droughted, now, a tomb and the perfect surprise:
breaths in lungs once shut, re-sighted eyes,
and in the first of all new hours,
Someone has made light work of death.
Viral Dailies, Day 11
Holy Saturday. A day of inexpressible anguish and loss. Far too often, contemporary Christianity seeks to gloss over this day in a mad rush to the Alleluias of Easter. This is unfortunate and weak theology. There is no resurrection without a tomb. There is no tomb without death. In Jesus’ case, an ignominious death. Unceremonial. Reprehensible.
If ever there was a poem more suited to the dark hopelessness of this day it is the famous “Funeral Blues” by W. H. Auden.
Read. Sit. Ponder. Enter. Weep. Repeat. 
Viral Dailies, Day 10
Good Friday.
Well, not so good for someone. Especially so for the rest of us. This day in history, God absorbed all the hatred, shame, pain, violence, discrimination, sin, and division into himself. Jesus became the great black hole out of which could escape nothing other than love, redemption, hope, and all things new.
As we lean, by faith, into this cosmic narrative, what once was dark can become light again. What once promised fear and undoing, now has potential to unlock a billion answered prayers.
This poem isn’t specifically a Good Friday poem. It is however, in the context of night and sleep, a promise therefrom.
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nighttime songs our fears erase
a story lived, now story told
we, early young, now later, old
see stranger things than daytime held
but not without our sorrows quelled
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we fluff and tuck and yawn and brush
pray God remove all sinning blush
the air now cool in silver glow
what dreams may come we do not know
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divested now of time and chance
we bid adieu and leave the dance
till thricely woven round with grace
the nighttime songs our fears erase
(c)Robert Alan Rife, 2013
Viral Dailies, Day 9
Today is Maundy Thursday.
Maundatum. Mandate. Commandment, from Jesus’ own words, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another” (John 13:34). It seems a little strange that such an ‘obvious’ thing should need a mention at all and that he calls it ‘new.’
But, there it is.
It was also the day when Jesus, through a shared meal, instituted the great theological metaphor of The Lord’s Supper, Communion, Eucharist. The sacrament. In it, the holy and profane kiss in one simple act.
Jesus, himself a living sacrament, brings a constant source of spiritual nourishment by means of something we do every day.
In celebration of this holy day, in the context of National Poetry Month, I give you this powerful sonnet by the ever-brilliant, Malcolm Guite.
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Maundy Thursday
Here is the source of every sacrament,
The all-transforming presence of the Lord,
Replenishing our every element
Remaking us in his creative Word.
For here the earth herself gives bread and wine,
The air delights to bear his Spirit’s speech,
The fire dances where the candles shine,
The waters cleanse us with His gentle touch.
And here He shows the full extent of love
To us whose love is always incomplete,
In vain we search the heavens high above,
The God of love is kneeling at our feet.
Though we betray Him, though it is the night.
He meets us here and loves us into light.
Viral Dailies, Day 8
The reasons to post and to celebrate continue to grow.
It is National Poetry Month. Celebration.
It is a global pandemic. Recognize, endure, pray, art.
Holy Week. Celebrate, remember, humility, transformation.
April 8 – my wife’s birthday. Definitely celebrate! And what better day than to post a love poem from the master himself? Today’s offering is from Uncle Bill. I give you a favourite Shakespeare love sonnet.
If I should think of love
I’d think of you, your arms uplifted,
Tying your hair in plaits above,
The lyre shape of your arms and shoulders,
The soft curve of your winding head.
No melody is sweeter, nor could Orpheus
So have bewitched. I think of this,
And all my universe becomes perfection.
But were you in my arms, dear love,
The happiness would take my breath away,
No thought could match that ecstasy,
No song encompass it, no other worlds.
If I should think of love,
I’d think of you.
Viral Dailies, Day 7
National Poetry Month.
Holy Tuesday.
COVID-19.
Social Distancing.
Kinda writes itself, doesn’t it?
Nah, we can do better. Instead, here’s a glorious piece by everyone’s favourite poet, Mary Oliver, God rest her. In this poem, she uses the ever-changing image of a swan to indicate the changes life imposes, coaxes, and expects from us. Who will we become as we drift and swim and soar through its days?
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The Swan
Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air –
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music – like the rain pelting the trees – like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds –
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?
Viral Dailies, Day 6
Holy Week continues, as does National Poetry Month…as does our shared quarantine. I think it is the perfect day to feature again Anneliese Myers. She is a talented, young poet who is also a friend and colleague with whom I served at Yakima Covenant Church. The breezy, whimsical quality of her work is easily matched by its heft. I hope you enjoy this as much as I.
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10,000 Reasons
So, I’ve written
10,000 words this week –
give or take.
It took thirty-eight-twenty-nine
to critique maps
hanging in dusty classroom 178.
Nine-eighty-one
summarized articles
about dead people and
outdated techniques;
forty-two-sixty-three
proposed research that,
once I get my degree,
no one will see.
The other –
thousandish? –
replied to a fraction
of e-mails received.
So, I thought, maybe now
I could write a word
to You.
But I’m tired,
uninspired,
and can write nothing new.
If only You gave deadlines
or promised feedback.
If only my heart moved against
the courage I lack.
-©Anneliese Myers
Anneliese Myers is a wife and graduate student in Yakima, WA. While pursuing a Master’s degree in Biology, she still finds time to write, looking for inspiration in her faith, family, and the beautiful Cascade mountains where her field work takes place.
Viral Dailies, Day 5
Today, National Poetry Month, my Viral Dailies poetry features and Holy Week converge. As such, this entire week will feature poetry that helps us turn our attentions in that direction. Palm Sunday of course recognizes that day when Jesus enters Jerusalem, riding the back of a donkey. It was an act of subversion, reversal, theology; it was, ultimately, an act of peace. On Palm Sunday, God in Jesus says ‘no’ to empire and ‘yes’ to the communion of the lost-and-found. In this act, Jesus pictures himself ruling not as dictator or caesar, but as Prince of Peace.
Today, I give you an older poem suitable to the day. Let’s have a blessed Holy Week together, sharing sacred thought and memory, and swallowing whole the hope it brings as we huddle in our homes, hiding from the COVID-19 scourge.
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the stones know something we do not
their tears now stain a palm-laden street
and cries reserved for a different day
burst out
unsettled
unstoppable
unreserved
for today only the stones understand
who rides upon them
(c)Robert Alan Rife, 4/13/14
Image found here
