Welcome to Poetry Party #70!
I select an image and suggest a theme/title and invite you to respond with your own poem. Scroll down and add it in the comments section below or join our Holy Disorder of Dancing Monks Facebook group and post there.
Feel free to take your poem in any direction and then post the image and invitation on your blog (if you have one), Facebook, or Twitter, and encourage others to come join the party! (If you repost the photo, please make sure to include the credit link below it and link back to this post inviting others to join us).
We began this month with a Community Lectio Divina practice and followed up with our Photo Party on the theme of “Call to Newness.” (You are most welcome to still participate). We continue this theme in our Poetry Party this month.
The photo above was received by me this past week at Disibodenberg, the beautiful monastic ruins in Germany where Hildegard of Bingen spent the first half of her life as a Benedictine. This place formed her for all that was to come in her life. I love doorways and thresholds and how they beckon us to something new. You are invited to share a poem about the call to newness in your own life. What thresholds are shimmering?
You can post your poem either in the comment section below*or you can join our Holy Disorder of Dancing Monks Facebook group (with close to 600 members!) and post there.
*Note: If this is your first time posting, or includes a link, your comment will need to be moderated before it appears. This is to prevent spam and should be approved within 24 hours.
59 Responses
Learning his name
_______________________
When the reprisals of our souls,
too young to love, too small for pain,
repeat their mistaken ventures into
the uncolored light of mistaken journeys,
then it is the walls whisper
their ghostlike songs of ever after –
sighs of the imperfect.
* * *
Here there are no endings,
only endings of old beginnings
that transform by a refusal
to submit to the indentured servitude
of the hollow and broken,
preferring instead the ancient newness
of Cistine handshakes.
* * *
In the cowls of earth, her ears of stone,
hear fathomless time, tonsured and teased
from her birthplace deep in
embowelled truth whose Name Is,
encompass within yourself this
faceless sojourner only now
learning his name.
Also posted to my blog: http://www.robslitbits.com
Good to be here. Good to read your words.
No endings, only endings of old beginnings that transform…this evokes in me an image of being contained within a circle of wholeness.
The Word Was Made Flesh and Dwelt Among Us
Verbum caro factum est
et habitavit in nobis
Sisters chant sunset vespers
lyrical hum of a harmless hive
too intent on honey and purpose
to notice the sweetness in the hammock nearby
Ave
Ave
Ave Maria
Remember, the first time?
Your name
in a cave
announcing your place
OVER and Over and over and over and over
until you said it again, again, again
or no longer longer
needed
to hear
poets
retire to single cells
and whisper lists of synonyms
for a jump rope rhyme
for breezes
through white cotton curtains
for the silver ring of dinner dishes
Church bells
and swallows
sing
This is the coming home time of day
Lovely…
Remembering the first time ~ Thank you. :)
Cell
Pigments of prayer illuminate life’s manuscript
Colours slowly ground by time paint intricate patterns
With water distilled through rocks of experience
A living word is etched by a feather on the breath of God.
Colours slowly ground by time paint intricate patterns
With creeping viriditas the lichen stains time’s walls
A living word is etched by a feather on the breath of God
Scribing his calligraphy of God-with-Us.
With creeping viriditas the lichen stains time’s walls
With water distilled through rocks of experience
Scribing his calligraphy of God-with-Us
Pigments of prayer illuminate life’s manuscript.
“Scribing his calligraphy of God-with-Us.” Ahh, this moves me deeply, Carolyn.
Cross over
into a place of Healing;
Here the body and soul
are nurtured…
The infirm —
made whole…
Come be healed, or cured:
Whichever.
come, cross over
into
Saint Hildegard’s Infirmary.
I’m receiving the invitation here to come, crossover.
Walking the Grace
That first day, before I knew
its path would become my way home,
some part of me fell into the labyrinth.
A thread of my cocoon must have snagged
on the silence at its centre and begun,
very gently, to unspool.
Step by step, with every labyrinth that I walked
it continued to unravel,
years of carefully spun layers,
leaving traces of presence in its wake.
Today, I felt the tug
of the final fibres being claimed,
my life now woven deep
into that meandering path.
A new story emerging from the old
with a shape and a voice
and wings.
My body feels the grace flow from each word. Such lovely imagery!
your poem brought tears. so lovely and shining with truth. thank you.
Newness
The face of God is always changing.
What was once a place of prayer
becomes a temple in a world of light.
Grass grows green —
below crumbling bricks — pushing
beyond prison walls.
Jean Crane
Our chains are gone – amen!
I’m moved by contrast of green growing grass beneath the crumbling bricks.
Your True Life
What shadows haunt this place?
What Faeries shimmer in grass?
And whose voices are those I hear?
The path fades into the courtyard,
The grass, lush, asking us to come and sit,
This place is alive with our future,
In a nether form.
Listen closely, don’t shrink back.
Come closer, and stand or sit,
Be here, in this beckoning place,
Hear its voices,
Breathe its life.
Let the mystic lead you forth,
To that place inside yourself.
Listen closely to your breath,
For on your breath is life’s call,
Or in the silent echo here
The aerie messenger’s will call you forth,
To a place so familiar and so far away.
So deep inside and yet so close.
Listen closely and Hildegard will tell you
What is true,
And you will feel all falsehood fade away,
As you stand in your true life .
“Be here…” Thank you for this.
Heart’s Desire
Step from cover
under the arch
and make no path
where moss grows.
Seek the place where
your window opens
out and also in. Free
yourself to work
the stone blocking
your heart’s desire.
“Seek the place where your window opens” sings to me tonight.
This is lovely; it’s our work, isn’t it.
Stonewall
by caraid o’brien
Through the threshold
Is a wall
Brick and immovable
For centuries
That I can see
Before even
My very first step
On the grass carpet
That remains untrodden
Though not wild.
Someone must have cut it
If not recently
Then previously.
I am not the first one here
A crooked seam, center field,
A darker veriditis underfoot
Implies a past, a her story.
The energetic outline
Of a human presence
Dematerialized.
Will Hildegard’s lurching ghost
Wimple askew
Whites stained
With iron gal ink
And juniper juice,
Show me how to scale the wall
To shimmy through the narrow
Window two stories up?
Are my baby holding hips too wide?
My son could fit through
But who would help him
Down the other side?
Maybe I should just turn around
Not enter where I see no exit.
The only way over is through.
What if I go around?
Who built these stonewalls?
Who ripped off the roof
So the vines could
Lap over rock
Weave through cracks?
Why does the greening
Desire structure
I seek to escape?
Maybe caressing battered limestone
Calms down a nervous plant
The way grass under sole
And dirt caked fingernail
Remembers what my birth erased:
Temporary, safe, of the earth,
Not the first.
I’m moved by the imagery of caressing battered limestone. Beautiful.
This is absolutely beautiful. A piece of art with words, wow :)
Bright green alive and new
Signaling a call
Not of sirens
but of The One
who creates and created
Amidst the ruin –
Rebirth!
Amen!
Kristina Skepton
Founder, SeeingGod Ministries
http://www.Facebook.com/SeeingGod
Amen!