his oratory the high wide lands, stone and thin soil in
the broad neolithic scape, scrubbed and sky dried.
the heavens were closer there, thinner air, a world’s distance
from the city-god drenched plain hard by
the corrupting sea, the malarial reaches of power.
in hand his shepherd’s crook, passed down
from one hand to another a thousand generations,
memory accumulating like the mounded tepes,
lately transformed into a cruciform shape.
so he spoke to his God,
reading the words of the holy Book in the land,
his flock spread out before him—wisdom! let us attend.
he wept that he could not be
more akin to the creatures under his care,
heart burning with the great merciful weight of things.
closing his eyes under the sheltering tree,
Sozon the friend of God looked
inward, was shown what would come to be:
a martyr’s death awful to the telling, and
a holy spring welling up at his feet, for the ages,
watering the earth with his blood and with water.
his spirit spread into the dolomitic cracks,
up surged the water cold, mixed with blessing.
dream and the mothering earth’s pure drink,
portal and vision and life,
the Cross tossed in the charging waters.
he picked up his shepherd’s crook and set out.
down from his hard and rough untilled garden,
leaving his sheep in the care of another,
down to the city and its viscous charms,
exquisite violence and offal piles.
up against the vain rage
he came, and with his staff struck down
the graven gold in the thronging temple,
burst it into a thousand pieces,
a fine loot and bold, gathered up,
and gave it to the city’s poor. the roman concreted
places rang out with the challenge, and the answer
was iron against flesh, the singe of the sword, and then
death upon a tree.
still blood lusting and even more so full of fear,
they dragged his holy flesh out to the edge of the city,
lit a fire, in unknowing sign of the cataclysm to come,
but the sky mocked them, the elements
overpowered the small weak weaponed men,
storm washed over them and washed out their flame.
time and distance condensed in him,
the heavens stayed their small fires, a greater flame
burned still in his several parts, hot and holy.
water, and blood, and the venerable body marked
with the pain and the dislocation, set to earth,
and still he shepherds us, drawn from the old soil,
cut from the new cloth of salvation, old wine
mingled with the new. Blessed Sozon,
pray God for us, send us out from the unabiding city,
and lay your staff against the idols yet.
the wild old lands wait a returning.
Tag: Original Poetry
Stability
Ah world of plastic and poorly bonded materia, fast consumption
Your truest mode, you will be washed in the floods of divine judgment
Woven into the fabric of the world, an assurance
That all our works will suffer the land only so long. Ephemera
Accumulate, then rot. One day a stylite will carve out a home
And radiate his holiness from some marbled remnants rising
Out of the Potomac’s heaped higher floodplain. He will climb down one day
And find at his feet a flint shard washed down from the highlands,
Proof of peoples’ longer gone but with longer echo. He will
Return to his perch and pray in words also solid and deep.
Love Making
‘Make love’ we say, and so here indeed is the fruit,
Our love made flesh and bone and blood, life
From love, and love from life. ‘Receive
The body of Christ’ we sing, love in spite of all
In flesh and blood for us, becomes us, and we Him.
Eucharist, this, the swell of thanksgiving in hearts and veins,
Lifting on the ethereal incense, and also as I rest my hands
On my wife’s body, feel this new life stretch and stir within her.
Love is an easy word to say and feel, but the real doing takes
Weight and density, runs along a rough contrary grain—
The pull of a baby in the womb, the push of rock and earth in tilling,
The crooked holy timber of the Cross, splintered and sorrowed.
In the end the only true loves are those that are made and that make,
The work of hand and heart in our slow but surely hallowed places.
On Not Knowing
There is now much to be said for a power of veiling,
Of making secret, leaving covered. Let this and that corner
Rest obscure, if seen at all then in the sorts of dreams
You had as a child, when your imagined maps had so many
Blank spaces, not just strange beasts in the luminous void,
But whole hidden worlds waiting to open up to you.
Or not—perhaps those others worlds would remain a mystery,
And that was just as good. Sometimes it is better to never know
What lies on the other side of the mountain, or what every
Symbol on the map means. When all can be known,
Every geography pieced together, charted down to the substrates,
The heart gets cramped, and busied with the many things.
Though the holy man can see innermost secrets, still
He sets himself up in the quiet unknowing of seclusion,
There to unsee and so to see further than any.
At the End of the Winter, Southwest Virginia
Here, now
What is keenest
Is the horizon above the barn,
White pines in rank and sharp air spilling down,
The winds off the Blue Ridge. We tramp up the melting snow the pools
The mud to the fence line, admire the red oxen in the pasture,
Auburn bodies of gentle power against the patching white,
Horns curve fierce and ivory, a piece with the lay of the land
And the land’s tongues’ gentle lilt. I know
The gentleness belies the fierceness, too,
And I pray both stay long and lean against the hard times
Building up brilliant store, a slumbering trout lily under the snow.
The Spirit of Robinson Jeffers Rises Along the Lost River
Gray clouds mount, earth and river sink down
Under the stones’ still new cut. The sliced bloodroot bleeds and bleeds,
But the ten thousand things fall silent along the bypassed highway.
Ah hawk, swooped and spun by a following raven,
There is no solace in what we think will be freedom, but only
Shadows and dreams chasing and chasing.
My skin laps the bloodroot’s flow and the limestone opens
To staunch the river’s run. So what is hidden is always coming out,
And returning to ground, the round and round of the world.
One name gives way to another. Time goes, and goes nowhere,
Goes everywhere. I lock eyes for a hanging moment with
The buzzard in silent glide. Somewhere the ten thousand things gather.
Untamed, Eucharist and Eschaton
Offer the light piercing and the springmorning clouds
Over the grey backboned ridgelines gathering into early bloom.
Offer the salttaste of the marsh receding under early summer’s
Thunderheads larger than our toilsome systems, looming.
Offer this stone rolled down from the mountains rising,
Worn to round in years and years of river rise and fall.
Offer the moments that are not contained, offer the wind wet and cold
Off the sprucetreed highlands. Savage and beautiful is closeness
To the sacred, what in the last decree cannot be controlled. In the end all
This worn anthropocene too must give way, sedimented back into the holy,
Soil and stone of the world, bright and becoming from the hand of the Father—
Eucharist rung out still from the trampled earth, so take up and sing in offering,
What is not yours is that for which you must most give thanks.
Walking in Tel Aviv the Night Before Flying Home
My feet take me westwards through a soft white night of street
Lights low and gentle. Outlined high rises climb up behind the city asleep
In the shadow of Shabbat. Coming to the shore of the Great Sea I pass by
Arab families circled on the sand laughing as the smells of low little grills alight
Mingle with the sea’s salt scent drifting skywards. Girls in head scarves
Bob along the surf’s edge blurred in the darkness. Ah, this is where I end up,
My own limbs laced with certain rhythms, effortless.
How many tongues, how many cartographies and lays of land
Jumble in me, palimpsetting one on another and in arabesquing interlace? The sand
Is soft on my unshod feet. Around the shore’s curve
The lights of old Jaffa glow, soft, against the dark rising sea.
Relics
And so this: culture, to cultivate, cultus,
The smell and feel of soil and of holy dust, the sacred grit
That will break the fine tuned gears of the machine,
Rust out its parts and reveal the garden.
To grow, to guide, to shape the self that
Passes beyond the self, finds the Other and the Elsewhere,
Here and now, and finally then. Watered and broken down.
Unless the seed die…
Such is the labor, and the prayer, the labor in prayer. Bowing,
My lips touch the bit of bone, proximity in fragments. From these
Pieces scattered and gathered grows the universe.
Nanih Waiya
The bones we carried
Were more than the bones that bore.
The long dry plains, then the great fathering water.
The dead cities mounded and the forgotten fields, the forests filling back in.
We brought with us our ancestors’ souls and maize seeds,
The rumor of strange beasts and men behind us.
At the leaning hill we stopped and felt the tannin dark waters
Lapping the cypress knees. Sandhill and bottomland, we spread out
And spread names over the rivers and rises, felt
Our speech along the land’s low and gentle lines. We laid
Our mothers’ and our fathers’ bones to rest in the red clayed ground,
Made ourselves native to the place, spoke the voices out from under the earth.
Thicket & Thorp 