A GIFT – TWO POEMS. . .

I continue to be engulfed in a tsunami of pain and anguish.  What had been mere waves washing over me these past months were transformed into this tsunami.  I began to feel relief as I heard the resistance and the healing stories emerge.  AND THEN, the tsunami was re-intensified by the very person who could have continued to add to both the resistance and the healing.

I wanted to write about this and each time I put finger to key what emerged seemed more like noise than nurture, more like wading in the shallows rather than diving into the depths, more like… Well, I think you get my meaning.  Yet, I still wanted to offer something.

I awoke this morning and immediately began to, once again, think about what I might offer us.  As I was listening to a commentator he offered me a gift when he asked: ‘Can the center hold?’  I immediately knew what I wanted to offer us this morning.  I offer us TWO POEMS. I invite us to reflect upon them and perhaps even invite another person or two into a searching conversation.  Here, then, are the TWO POEMS:

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?    –William Butler Yeats

A Ritual To Read To Each Other

 

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider–
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give–yes or no, or maybe–
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep. –William Stafford

 

Gentle Reader, I leave us with the question that the great Spanish poet, Antonio Machado offers us, a question for each of us to hold and a question for our Nation to hold:  ‘What have you done with the garden entrusted to you?’