“I pray like a robber asking alms at the door of a farmhouse to which he is ready to set fire.” – Léon Bloy
I came across this some time ago, I don’t remember how. I ended up having to write a poem about it. Does that ever happen to you?
Tag: poetry
To Statecraft Embalmed – Marianne Moore
An early work, and I love it. “To Statecraft Embalmed” starts with an image that might just as easily refer to a certain (current) political figure:
The only version of the full text I can find online isn’t formatted exactly how piece is presented in her Collected Works, a volume I seem to have misplaced precisely as I sat down to write this post.
The whole thing reads to me as uncanny prophesy, hard plumage and all.
Nativity Ode – John Milton
Also called “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” or “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, 1629” or “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, Compos’d 1629.”
https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/nativity/text.shtml
I wrote a seminar thesis on this once. It’s not just about connecting the birth of Christ to the passion in theological terms. Milton is making a sort of quantum confession: the birth of God in time collapses our reality. The Christmas Day of 1629 becomes, itself, “the happy morn;” the liturgical hymn of Philippians 2:6-8 (and 9-11) is transfigured into Milton’s second stanza; everywhere the light is breaking in, nowhere can the natural order contain the “spooky action” (no longer at a distance).
In other words, John Milton was a genius.
Depression – Jane Kenyon
Cosmology of Jawbones
Spacetime is a crooked smile
bent to match the mouths
we love and taste and pray with.
First published at Quatrain Fish.
Wintry Mix: Natsume Sōseki, Neil Young, and My Eldest…
I posted “Over the wintry” earlier today.
I’ve been playing “Winterlong” on guitar between outside snow day fun and shoveling.
Inspired by Natsume, I thought it would be fun to ask/make my eldest to write a haiku about today’s weather. We read The Trials of Apollo series together, and every chapter starts with a haiku, which is to say, the form is familiar. As is the cheek:
I like to eat snow.
I pelt my Dad with snowballs.
Don’t eat the yellow snow.
I mean, no lies detected.
Over the Wintry – Natsume Sōseki
Over the wintry
forest, winds howl in rage
with no leaves to blow.
Natsume Sōseki
Chris Cocca 