Poems for the Season 8 comments

By Peggy Rosenthal

Sometimes with my Christmas cards I include a favorite seasonal poem. So consider this post a greeting card for the season.

First, I can’t resist sharing the poem that has been my meditation this Advent. I always treasure Advent’s special spirit of hushed longing. This year I’ve found it expressed in a poem not written specifically for Advent: Robert Bly’s “The Roof Nail,” in his new collection Talking into the Ear of a Donkey. (Thanks to Richard Osler, well known to the Glen Workshop community, for sending me this poem.)

Bly’s short poem ends:

The tiny roof nail lies on the ground, aching for the roof.
Some little bone in our foot is longing for heaven.

During Advent, I’ve been meditating with those marvelous images of the “tiny roof nail” and the “little bone,” with their “aching for the roof” and “longing for heaven”—perfect images for our human condition.

Another image for this longing, one interlaced with the evil and suffering of our lot, is in “The Coming,” by Welsh poet R.S. Thomas. This is a poem explicitly about the Incarnation. In it, Thomas imagines a scene not in our scriptures:

And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look, he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, a river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
                       On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.

To our scorched land, with evil running through it like a serpent, Jesus makes the decision to come. What moves him (as R.S. Thomas imagines it) is the sadness of our barren life without his coming, our “thin arms” held longingly toward the sky—like Bly’s roof nail aching for the roof.

And for Thomas, as for centuries of the Christian tradition until about 150 years ago, the cross is inherent in the incarnation. That “bare tree” with its “crossed / Boughs”: Thomas’s Jesus sees them and all they imply, yet still says “Let me go there.”

One of our earliest Christian poets, the fourth-century Syriac named Ephrem, took this and other paradoxes of the incarnation as his favorite theme. In nearly thirty Nativity hymns, he rang changes on the wonder of God becoming human and thereby transforming humankind forever.

Here’s just a taste from a hymn that begins with the delightfully paradoxical couplet “Mary bore a mute Babe / though in Him were hidden all our tongues.”

He was lofty but he sucked Mary's milk,
and from His blessings all creation sucks.
He is the Living Breast of living breath;
by His life the dead were suckled, and they revived....
As again He dwelt in His mother's womb,
in His womb dwells all creation.
Mute He was as a babe, yet He gave
to all creation all His commands.

I never cease to be wowed by Ephrem’s maternal images for Jesus. How I’d love to hear these lines read from the pulpit on Christmas morning!

Mary’s role in the Nativity is, naturally, a popular motif of poets. Here is Lucille Clifton speaking in Mary’s voice as she gives birth, from a poem simply called (with lowercase) “mary”:

something is in this night
oh Lord have mercy on me

i feel a garden
in my mouth

between my legs
i see a tree

There’s that tree again. Like R.S. Thomas, Clifton draws crucifixion imagery into the incarnation. Yet Clifton’s tree also subtly images the abundant life of God’s kingdom which Jesus’ birth initiates: syntactically parallel to the “garden” in the verse before, this tree might be the lushly branching one that the birds build their nest in as parable for the kingdom of God (Luke 13:19).

From Clifton’s “garden” of the nativity, we can step into the garden imagery with which Denise Levertov shares her hopes in “For the New Year, 1981.” The poem begins with the poet having only “a small grain of hope” for the new year. Yet she moves us through a paradox that seems a sort of miracle: by breaking off a fragment of this tiny grain and giving it away, she can see her hope increase.

I break off a fragment
to send you.

Please take this grain of a grain of hope
so that mine won’t shrink.

Please share your fragment
so that yours will grow.

Only so, by division,
will hope increase,

like a clump of irises, which will cease to flower
unless you distribute
the clustered roots, unlikely source—
clumsy and earth-covered—
of grace.

In the 1970s, I happened to live a few blocks from Denise Levertov’s home in Somerville, Massachusetts. She and my husband were both teaching in the Tufts University English Department at the time. I remember walking by her little house in the summer and being astounded by the brilliant beauty of her lush English garden, which filled the front yard.

So I know that she writes from the experience of her hands in the dirt when she offers, at the end of this poem, the clustered roots of irises as a “clumsy and earth-covered” image of “grace.” It’s true: perennial flowers like irises must be dug up and divided in order to thrive. The extra roots are often given away to neighbors.

It’s such a natural, homey image for how we must share of ourselves in order to thrive. And the perfect follow-up to our celebration of the Nativity.

Our gratitude—for the God who gave himself to us for our salvation—moves us to give of ourselves “for the new year.”

This, at least, is Levertov’s hope—and mine, too.