New Moon, an Anniversary, and the Equinox

March 19, 2007 · by Christine

Last night was the New Moon, the time of darkness that comes each month inviting us into the womb of the night.  I am trying to live with more awareness of the moon’s phases even if I can’t see the night sky very often because I live in Seattle which is both urban and gets lots of cloud cover and rain.  There is something powerful to me about taking that ebbing and rising into my own body and honoring the rhythms that rule the night sky in some small way.

Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of the war in Iraq.  My heart breaks over the untold suffering that has occurred because of this endless violence.  Part of my Lenten practice is to lament, and my heart cries out in great wordless sorrow.  I cry because so often I go numb and I forget.  I forget that there are bodies being torn apart, families being destroyed a mere ocean away.  It happens even in my backyard and I am blind. The sky is weeping, flooding the world around me with tears over the terrible suffering in the world.  Because all I seem to be able to offer in the face of such waves of death and destruction is poetry, I offer here the words of Denise Levertov who wrote this poem about the Vietnam War, but it is of course universal in its imagery and power:

Life at War

The disasters numb within us
caught in the chest, rolling
in the brain like pebbles. The feeling
resembles lumps of raw dough

weighing down a child’s stomach on baking day.
Or Rilke said it, ‘My heart. . .
Could I say of it, it overflows
with bitterness . . . but no, as though

its contents were simply balled into
formless lumps, thus
do I carry it about.’
The same war

continues.
We have breathed the grits of it in, all our lives,
our lungs are pocked with it,
the mucous membrane of our dreams
coated with it, the imagination
filmed over with the gray filth of it:

the knowledge that humankind,

delicate Man, whose flesh
responds to a caress, whose eyes
are flowers that perceive the stars,

whose music excels the music of birds,
whose laughter matches the laughter of dogs,
whose understanding manifests designs
fairer than the spider’s most intricate web,

still turns without surprise, with mere regret
to the scheduled breaking open of breasts whose milk
runs out over the entrails of still-alive babies,
transformation of witnessing eyes to pulp-fragments,
implosion of skinned penises into carcass-gulleys.

We are the humans, men who can make;
whose language imagines mercy,
lovingkindness; we have believed one another
mirrored forms of a God we felt as good—

who do these acts, who convince ourselves
it is necessary; these acts are done
to our own flesh; burned human flesh
is smelling in Viet Nam as I write.

Yes, this is the knowledge that jostles for space
in our bodies along with all we
go on knowing of joy, of love;

our nerve filaments twitch with its presence
day and night,
nothing we say has the not the husky phlegm of it in the saying,
nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness,
the deep intelligence living at peace would have.

-Denise Levertov

We are also on the verge of the Spring Equinox and I am reminded of another line from a Denise Levertov poem:  “How could we tire of hope?-so much is in bud. How could desire fail?-we have only begun to imagine justice and mercy.”  The moon will slowly begin to reappear in the blackened sky.  Spring is exploding around us out of buds into blossoms.  The world around us is doing everything it can to keep hope alive.

-Christine Valters Paintner @ Abbey of the Arts

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