Welcome to our 44th Poetry Party!
I select an image and suggest a theme/title and invite you to respond with your poems or other reflections. Add your responses in the comments section. Feel free to take your poem in any direction and then post the image and invitation on your blog (if you have one) and encourage others to come join the party! (permission is granted to reprint the image if a link is provided back to this post)
Poetry Party Theme: Entering the Desert’s Fire
This week the Christian liturgical season of Lent begins on Ash Wednesday. For 40 days we are invited on an inner pilgrimage which parallels the desert journey Jesus made before he began his public ministry. In the Hebrew and Christian scriptures the desert is a place of preparing our hearts, of stripping away of false securities, of radical surrender, and of invitation to transformation. The Israelites wandered in the Sinai desert for 40 years and the early Christian monks went out into the desert to find a place of profound solitude and silence. The desert is an archetypal place where we confront our inner demons and are purified and transformed by the its heat.
I invite you this week to write a poem about your own invitation to enter the refiner’s fire – in alchemy lead is transformed into gold through heat and this becomes a metaphor for the human soul. What is the lead within you ready to be transformed into something treasured?
The poem could be a blessing for the journey ahead or an invocation of your deepest longings for this sacred time. Allow yourself to feel the desert heat as you write and invite in its power to spark, ignite, and illuminate the world.
50 Responses
DESERT
There’s no need
to go any farther
The desert is here
In this comfortable room
With this man
in his heart and mind.
There’s no need
to seek the emptiness
the silence
the dark sky
They are here
in this comfortable room
with this man
in his heart and mind.
And if redemption
is to come it must
come here
In this comfortable room
With this man
in his heart and mind.
My poem is about the sacred process of manuscript illumination and the deeply transformational energies that change an artist while they work…
http://sybilarchibald.com/blog/2010/02/16/the-artist-illuminated/
http://lanechanges.blogspot.com/
What We Didn’t Know
What we didn’t know
Was that our hearts
Would burn
Within us,
Just like their hearts
Burned when
The Fire
Spoke
On the road.
Emmaus-bound,
They thought,
But really,
Like us,
They were
Bound to
The Consuming One.
The Word,
Made Flesh, newly spoken,
Remade their
Leaden downcast
Faces,
Their slowness of
Heart,
Into
Glowing Ones who
Declared the Truth
Of The Risen Bread
And Flowing Wine
To doubting others,
To themselves,
Lead unto
Recognizing
Him
By
Revelation
Of the Resurrected Word.
What we didn’t know
Was that
Our hearts,
Too,
Would find,
in the burning of the dross
Hearing afresh
The Refreshing Word,
Right in the middle of
Our everydayness,
On the far side of
today’s ordinary desert,
A Burning Bush.
Bare-hearted among
Such
Holy Ground
Declarations:
I AM who I AM
What we didn’t know
Was that
Somehow,
The Word
Swiftly
Burns,
Even now all these years later,
With Emmaus unveiling.
All that is not
Holy
Is burned up.
The Fire
Invites us
To hearts aflame.
We become
Fire desirers.
O, Burning Wondrous One,
Kindle the awareness
Of Your presence,
In burning bush,
In Word along the road.
Oh, Holy Fire,
Be my desire.
Lane M. Arnold
On the eve of Lent 2010
wondering at how bright the Word glows
& if I’ll let Him consume all that is not of Him.
Turning aside, at bush or along some new Emmaus road, to notice
Holy Fire burning: Three-in-one: Father, Son, Spirit.
You are invited to ponder the Holy with me.
Joyfully,
Lane
Psalm of the Desert
Lord, I am your canvas.
Paint a Life.
Fill me beyond my earthbound borders,
your primordial paint thick upon my parts.
Put your pigment lavishly in love-parched places,
squeezing, squiggly, swirling upon
my stretched taut skin.
Color me wildly awash in wonder.
Layer me richly across the belly of belief.
Leave no place bare,
panting for the shape of your brush.
Awaken hues of hidden heavens,
summon glories yet untold.
Trace eternal ecstasy on the contour of my face,
blend into my being
the beauty of your grace.
Paint me.
Paint me bold.
Picture here the mystery,
the cosmos cannot hold.
– Rev. Sally M. Brower, PhD
New Paradigm
Spirit’s flown the coop.
Holy Mystery’s on the loose,
fanning embers of desire.
My soul’s been kissed by fire.
I flare; I flame; I turn to ash
and am scattered
on the labyrinth’s path,
so I can find my way
back home to Love.
I’ve not been to the party before, but here’s my contribution. Thanks for generating the creative spark:
Desert Fire
( Malachi 3 v.2)
Despairing of myself
I have desired to go
alone
into the desert’s fire
I lay myself down
on the operating table
as on an altar;
eyes blinded by light.
A laser beam
pinpoints the cancer of my sin;
the smell of burnt offerings rising
as a smoke signal of
my willingness to be made whole.
The white hot heat
of the surgeon’s knife,
an intensity beyond pain,
cauterising my wounds.
I have only to submit.
Then I rise
hollowed,
hallowed,
healed
to go back changed for ever.
But my God calls me to meet her
at the communal washtubs.
Amidst the general hubbub
and under others’ gaze
God and I sort through
my laundry basket
down to the deepest layer
where lurk
the secret, shameful stains.
With vigour and good humour
God takes my dirty washing in her hands
and a bar of soap
and we both rub away till our hands are red raw.
“Till next week, love” she says.
In Melbourne
We have
Bushfire survival plans.
“Stay and defend or go early.”
This Lent, same choice-
Stay and defend
And learn
What is of value.
Or go early
Avoid the risk
Of immolation
But go where?
To whom shall I go?
Cross of ashes
Will reveal
The way.
My poem is a form I learned from you – the pantoum. You can find it on my blog:
http://differenceayearmakes.wordpress.com/
(It will post on 2/16, after midnight EST)
Here’s my poem, “fear not the rub of ash”:
http://writingwithoutpaper.blogspot.com/2010/02/fear-not-rub-of-ash-poem.html