Poetry | Contemplative Inquiry

POEM: A WITHERED TREE

Not a twig or leaf on the old tree,

Wind and frost harm it no more.

A man could pas through a hole in its belly,

Ants crawl searching under its peeling bark.

Its only lodger, the toadstool which dies in a morning,

The birds no longer visit in the twilight.

But its wood can still spark tinder.

It does not care yet to be only the void at its heart.

By Han Yü (768-824)

From: Poems of the Late T’ang translated from the Chinese with an introduction by A.C. Graham Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965

Han Yü was primarily an essayist and polemicist, and initiated an ultimately successful Confucian revival at a time of Buddhist cultural dominance. When writing verse, he adopted devices traditionally confined to prose and to fu (prose poems) and sought to attend to the social and human content of poetry.

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January 18, 2016

POEM: DAWN’S ROSE

Dawn’s rose

Is melting an old frost moon.

Agony under agony, the quiet of dust,

And a crow talking to stony skylines.

Desolate is the crow’s puckered cry

As an old woman’s mouth

When the eyelids have finished

And the hill’s continue.

A cry

Wordless

As a newborn baby’s grieving

On the steely scales.

As the dull gunshot and its after-râle

Among conifers, in rainy twilight.

Or the suddenly dropped, heavily dropped

Star of blood on the fat leaf.

Ted Hughes, in Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow London & Boston: Faber and Faber, 1972

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January 11, 2016

POEM: THE SHELL

This post is a poem by Vernon Watkins

Who would devise

But the dark sea this thing

Of depth, of dyes

Claws of weed cling,

Whose colour cries:

‘I am of water, as of air the wing’,

Yet holds the eyes

As though they looked on music perishing.

Yet the shell knows

Only its own dark chamber

Coiled in repose

Where without number

One by one goes

Each blind wave, feeling mother of pearl and amber,

Flooding, to close

A book all men might clasp,

Yet none remember.

Too far away

For thought to find the track,

Sparkling with spray

Rose, green and black,

The colours play, strained by the ebb, revealing in the wrack

The myth of day,

A girl too still to call her bridegroom back.

There falls the weight

Of glory unpossessed;

There the sands late

Hold the new guest

Whose ponderous freight

Draws the pool’s hollow like a footprint pressed.

Its outcast state

Suddenly seems miraculous and blest.

Turn it. Now hold

Its ancient heart. How fair

With lost tales told

In sea-salt air

Light’s leaf-of-gold

Leaps from the threshold up the spiral stair,

Then lost, is cold,

Bound in a flash to rock with Ariadne’s hair.

Vernon Watkins New Selected Poems Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2006. (Edited with an introduction by Richard Ramsbotham. Foreword by Rowan Williams)

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December 11, 2015

ST. LUCY’S DAY

“LUCIA PROCESSION” BY FREDRICK MAGNUSSON – ST. LUCY’S DAY, SWEDEN, 2007.

Saint Lucy’s Day is on December 13, part of Advent in the Christian year. I’m posting early because I will be spending the next week or so off the internet.

This feast once coincided with the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year before calendar reforms. Her feast day has become a festival of light, something that modern Pagans would perhaps more readily associate with Imbolc. St. Lucy’s Day is celebrated as a major feast day in Scandinavia with its long dark winters.

Lucy is called Lucia and is represented as a woman in a white dress and red sash with a crown or wreath of candles on her head. In both Norway and Sweden, girls dressed as Lucy carry rolls and cookies in procession as songs are sung. Even boys take part in the procession as well, playing different roles associated with Christmas. It is said that to vividly celebrate St. Lucy’s Day will help one live the long winter days with enough light.

I have tended more to link the day to a very different response to the day – John Donne’s poem A Nocturnall Upon St. Lucies Day, Being the Shortest Day. This was composed in the 1590’s, well before calendar reform in England.

The poem is linked to a personal bereavement as well as the season. I share the first two verses. They are very much about the young poet’s own experience, rather than the season or the one who has been lost – though in a sense both the poet’s feelings and the poem itself are a service to her. The words themselves give the dark its voice, capturing the moment of desolation fully, and holding it. They do not move on to any culturally expected renewal, but rather to an alchemical anti-renewal instead. If there is any redemption it is in the writing itself, the expression. Donne was a good English writer in a time of good English writing.

Tis the yeares midnight, and it is the dayes,

Lucies, who scare seaven houres herself unmaskes,

The Sunne is spent, and now his flasks

Send forth light squibs, no constant rayes;

The worlds whole sap is sunke;

The general balme th’hydroptique earth hath drunk,

Whither as to the beds-feete, life is shrunke,

Dead and enterr’d; yet all these seeme to laugh.

Compared to mee, who am their Epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers bee

At the next world, that is, at the next Spring;

For I am every dead thing.

In whom love wrought new Alchimie.

For his art did expresse

A quintessence even from nothingnesse,

From dull privations, and leane emptinesse:

He ruin’d mee, and I am re-begot

Of absence, darkenesse, death; things which are not.

John Hayward (editor) John Donne Dean of St, Paul’s Complete Poetry and Prose London: The Nonesuch Press, 1967 (Donne became Dean of St, Paul’s in London a long time after he wrote this poem).

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December 9, 2015

POEM: WATER AND WAVE

I’m sharing this song of Kabir because I enjoyed it and felt cheered by it. I liked its devotional and ecstatic note – not my usual one.. I have harmonised it with my way of Sophia by changing a ‘his’ to a ‘her’.

I have been thinking of the difference

Between water

And the waves on it. Rising,

Water’s still water, falling back,

It is water, will you give me a hint

How to tell them apart?

Because someone has made up the word

“Wave”, do I have to distinguish it

From water?

There is a Secret One inside us;

The planets in all the galaxies

Pass through her hands like beads.

That is a string of beads one should look at with

Luminous eyes.

A weaver by trade but a poet-singer by calling, Kabir lived in fifteenth century India. His philosophy incorporated various beliefs of both Muslims and Hindus and later became one of the major influences behind Sikhism. Like Rumi, further to the west and generations earlier, his generously devotional and ecstatic path made him a natural bridge builder between traditions.

Kabir Ecstatic poems Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992 The English translations are free enough for Robert Bly to call them ‘versions by Robert Bly’. Given Bly’s freedom I have changed a ‘his’ to a ‘her’ above to support the poetry of my own gnosis. There is an earlier set of translations published by MacMillan in New York in 1915 by Rabindranath Tagore assisted by Evelyn Underhill under the title Songs of Kabir. Whilst I don’t follow Bly in calling the English of the earlier work “useless”, I do find that Bly’s interpretation has more passion and power. The Bly work includes an insightful afterword Kabir and the transcendental Bly by John Stratton Hawley.

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December 3, 2015

POEM: THE MOON IN DEWDROPS

Simplicity and complexity, elegance and wisdom combined in the poetry of Japanese Zen. I notice that I respond more strongly to such poetry than I do to didactic texts about meditation and philosophy.

To what shall

I liken the world?

Moonlight, reflected

In dewdrops,

Shaken from a crane’s bill.

I particularly love this poem. The apparent naturalism of the imagery makes it powerful and accessible to anyone. Yet for me, this poem also brings up wider issues about reading and interpretation. The poet’s location in place, time and culture do make a difference. Ehei Dogen (1200-1253) was one of the first to transmit Zen Buddhism from China to Japan and was founder of the Soto School. His poem is a waka – a 31 syllable form predating the invention of haiku. Dogen is a key figure in both Japanese Buddhism and Japanese literature.

In Mahayana Buddhism, the Buddhism of all Japanese schools including Zen, the moon stands for Buddha-nature. So the poem teaches a familiar Mahayana truth that the moon (Buddha-nature) is completely reflected in every one of the countless dew drops (all things) without discrimination, namely one in all, all in one. This understanding is accompanied by a sense of fragility and impermanence within nature – strongly present in Japanese culture independently of Buddhism and reinforced by Buddhist teaching. Dogen gives us elegance and complexity in a 31 syllable form.

Hee-Jin Kim*, a modern Zen scholar, takes this further, bringing out Dogen’s sensitivity to history as well as to nature. He draws attention to the word ‘shaken’: each dew drop holds a full yet shaken reflection of the moon. Dogen lived in what was seen as a dark and ill-starred time in Japanese history. Many Buddhists thought that even their path was compromised and talked of degenerate dharma (mappo). Kim understands Dogen as resisting this ideology of despair whilst fully aware of the collective turmoil. On this reading, the poem asserts that timelessness is experienced within, and only within, momentariness, even when the times are stressed.

To what shall

I liken the world?

Moonlight, reflected

In dewdrops,

Shaken from a crane’s bill.

* Hee-Jin Kim Dogen on meditation and thinking: a reflection on his view of Zen Albany, New York: State University, 2007 (At the time of publication Hee-Jin Kim was Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of Oregon. He is also the author of Dogen-Kigen: Mystical Realist).

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November 12, 2015

POEM: A PILLOW BOOK

The wisdom of diffident humanism. Spontaneity, immersion-in-the-moment and dissolved boundaries aren’t everything. Our narrative natures may be present, self-conscious and hyper-sensitive as we negotiate connection between self and other. In my world this too has integrity, beauty, and tenderness.

I lie in bed, watching you

Dress yourself in nudity

For your part in a story

You are about to tell me.

Once upon a time, you seem to say,

There was a woman who took off all her clothes

And stood for a moment

With one hand on her hip.

You have my full attention

As you pile your hair on top of your head

And let it fall down again.

Up to this point I am familiar with the story.

Your movements suggest a possible outline,

But nothing is certain yet.

You lift your arms above your head

In a gesture of boredom or surrender.

Your hands touch in mid-air

And you turn them palm-side out

In a kind of question mark,

As you ask for help with the ending.

Hugo Williams, West End Final London: Faber & Faber, 2009. The publisher’s blurb describes this collection as a set of “sardonic investigations into the fault line between voice and projection”.

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November 5, 2015

POEM: OLDER

I was recently introduced to this poem, about being older, by my friend Rosa Davis. I’m grateful for the discovery.

It’s not quite god

Pocketed deep inside you now

This wording of your inner voice

No longer needing an answer

This chest-centred warmth

Stillness of snow

Sheltering every branch and twig

Not god, only a sense

That this is enough.

From Caroline Natzler, Only Grenadine Press, Catford: 2015

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October 10, 2015

POEM: RELIGION

There are times, moods really, where the Druid path feels a bit rugged and aspirational. For such occasions the poet Hugo Williams offers another option.

If it were up to me

I would make use of sleep.

Going to church

Would involve a flight of stairs

To a familiar bedroom,

Where a broken alarm clock told the time.

The spreading of sheets,

The turning down of blankets,

Would be followed by the drawing of curtains in broad daylight,

The ritual of undressing.

Members of my religion

Would be encouraged to sleep in

On Monday mornings

And any other morning they felt like it, with no questions asked.

Sleep notes would be provided.

Couples would be authorised

To pull the covers over their heads

And spend their days tucked up

In cosy confessionals,

Where all their sins would be forgiven.

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September 5, 2015

POEM: TALIESIN

Poem by Ross Nichols, who founded OBOD in 1964. I like his seamless interweaving of naturalistic, mythic and theosophical themes – because for him they are one integrated experience. For me the poem reads like the work of someone who needed to live it in order to write it.

Here the Fish enters

The world of dark water

Pre-birth waters

Waterworld Elysium

Lake Tegid and the magic weir.

Much does he grow,

Many his transformations.

Warm are the waters,

The dark waters of Tegid,

And they swiftly flow

Downwards as he grows.

Talisin is found in the weir:

Elphin finds him

In a bag of leather

Where the waterworld dams,

Where the womb-waters

Are falling terribly

At the weir of birth.

The entering fish

Was the spirit of Taliesin:

His transformations

Were the many souls and bodies of Taliesin:

Leading him gently, drifting him slowly

Into the bodily definition of Taliesin,

His bag of leather,

His separated skin.

And Taliesin, after his separated life,

His songs and his wonders. His challenges and his fame,

Shall enter again as a Fish,

Shall know again sufferings and transfigurations

And the waters of Tegid.

For Taliesin was ever upon earth,

Knew all things, suffered all things.

And Taliesin shall be

In many wonderful shapes,

A grain of wheat and a hare

Sown and running

While there are fields, and the spirit of men,

Leaping alive at a harvest,

Or silver in the waters of time.

This poem can be found in the collection Prophet Priest and King: the Poetry of Ross Nichols edited and introduced by Jay Ramsay Lewes: Oak Tree Press, 2001.

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Contemplative Inquiry

Tag: Poetry

February 4, 2016

POEM: A WITHERED TREE

January 18, 2016

POEM: DAWN’S ROSE

January 11, 2016

POEM: THE SHELL

December 11, 2015

ST. LUCY’S DAY

December 9, 2015

POEM: WATER AND WAVE

December 3, 2015

POEM: THE MOON IN DEWDROPS

November 12, 2015

POEM: A PILLOW BOOK

November 5, 2015

POEM: OLDER

October 10, 2015

POEM: RELIGION

September 5, 2015

POEM: TALIESIN