Wintering this year in southern Arizona, I’m having trouble grasping that Advent is here. Brilliantly sunlit skies and daytime temperatures in the 60s: this can’t be Advent.

So to get into the spirit of Advent, I’m returning to some poems that my colleague David Impastato and I used when we offered an Advent Poetry Retreat in Cincinnati in 2003.

We began with Denise Levertov’s “Swan in Falling Snow.” Now the snow imagery is not connecting with my Arizona environs. But the poem’s image of the immobile swan speaks of Advent’s hushed waiting.

Silence
Deepened, deepened. The short day
Suspended itself, endless.

I’m grateful to Fr. Murray Bodo’s contemplative reading of this poem in his Poetry as Prayer: Denise Levertov, some of which appeared in Image #27.

Father Bodo knew Levertov personally during the course of her conversion to Christianity, and so he is able to bring into and through the poem his insights into her Advent sensibility of suspended hope. “The short day / Suspended…”: this is Advent’s spirit.

David and I offered retreatants another Levertov poem as well, “Re-rooting” (from her 1972 collection Candles in Babylon). The poem pictures people trying to re-root some plants:

the force
of life springing in them that made them
spring away from our hands—

Here is an Advent image I can easily connect with Arizona, where our community garden is just being planted. Hidden forces of life eager to spring loose: this is Advent’s spirit.

And of course David and I gave the retreatants some Annunciation poems. We had trouble choosing which; no biblical scene except the Crucifixion is more popular among poets than the Annunciation. We chose Elizabeth Jennings’ “Annunciation” (from her 1986 Collected Poems), which imagines Mary’s inner being after the angel has left.

Nothing will ease the pain to come
Though now she sits in ecstasy
And lets it have its way with her.

Annunciation poems often remind us, as Jennings’ does, that this child in Mary’s womb will be born to suffer a dreadful death for our salvation. Jennings gives Mary an intimation of this future, while also highlighting Mary’s patience: this too is Advent’s spirit.

As a companion piece, we offered retreatants Lucille Clifton’s “mary” (in her 1987 collection Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir). Clifton’s Mary also intimates her unborn son’s future:

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

That tree could be an image of natural growth, like the plants of Levertov’s “Re-rooting.” But any tree in the context of Mary’s pregnancy must also be the Tree of the Cross. Though we don’t often wrap the Cross into our Advent reflections, Clifton reminds us that we should. It is an age-old connection: the earliest Christmas cards, in the nineteenth century, routinely included the Cross or Crown of Thorns in their iconography.

And southern Arizona’s connection with Advent’s intimation of suffering? Alas, it’s all too real. For this suffering spirit of Advent, I need only look south to the border wall built to keep Mexicans out of the U.S. The wall has pushed economic migrants into Arizona’s harsh desert mountains. To see the holy child who will come, I need only look at the baby carried by her mother across this inhospitable terrain, the mother exhausted from the days’ long trek and terrified of the Border Patrol agents who will jail her and then dump her back into Mexico if they catch her.

The Flight of the Holy Family: how often do we recall this episode of the Christmas narrative as we anticipate and then celebrate the birth of Jesus?

We tend to oversimplify Advent into wreaths and candles. We tend to oversimplify Christmas into gifts as well as gratitude to God for the saving grace of Jesus’ birth. Poems help recall us to the complexities of our salvation. Levertov’s Swan, though “soft in still air” is also “frozen hard,” “weary, immobile.” Clifton’s Mary, though feeling a kiss “as soft as cotton,” cries out “oh Lord have mercy on me.”

I’m not trying to spoil the spirit of Advent—only to draw on poets’ insights into depths of the season that get obscured by sleigh-rides and tinsel.

But to close on a more upbeat note, I recall another poem we used in the Advent retreat. It’s Australian poet Les Murray’s “Animal Nativity,” from Murray’s Translations from the Natural World but reprinted also in David Impastato’s invaluable anthology of contemporary Christian poetry, Upholding Poetry. Murray delightfully pictures all the animals at Jesus’ birth perceiving him as one of their own:

Swallows flit in the stable as if
a hatching of their kind,
turned human…
Cattle are content that this calf
must come in human form.
Spiders discern a water-walker.

The fun here is at the service of another dimension of Advent’s spirit: anticipation of the One who will come to renew all of creation, indeed a “water-walker” who will turn water into wine.