a triad of poems by nicholas samaras

Psalm as Frustration I Can Live With

I love the fierce wind outside my window

but know I would freeze in it.

I love the fierce wind from where I view it.

I love to wake and feel the presence of the Lord within.

I feel his presence only to lose it,

lose his presence only to feel it return.

I am seriousness which falls away from seriousness.

I control and lose control. I seize and lose my grasp,

don't see and glimpse again.

I ration the irrational. I dive into ecstasy

and love the Lord as long as I can bear,

as I love the fierce wind outside my window.

The Psalm of Your Face

Lord, let your face be lined.

Lord, let your hair be gray with patience.

Holy Father, let your cheeks be silver with long growth

as you put up with me and put up with me.

Lord, let your face be a blazon of parts

in which I can name you sufficient

to be seen in your unseen presence.

Lord, let your face be lined with the knowledge

of my sins. Let your brow be uncreased in forgiveness.

Lord, let your eyes be clear of lightning

and your foggy voice unbass itself of thunder.

Lord, let your face be lined

and your massive chest be peaceful in breathing,

the falling and rising that is my slow way to you.

The Psalm of Then

Then, the Lord heard me in the wilderness of my soul.

Then, the lost place of me became clear.

Then, I recognized distraction for what it is.

Then, I was freed from the desert of diversion.

Then, I was moved to the green oasis within me.

Then, the still voice of the Lord was as the depth of water.

Then, I could cease the constant music in my head.

Then, I could move beyond myself and the noise of myself.

Then, I could hear the smallness of my own voice.

Then, the still voice of the Lord was as the depth of water.

Then, the lost place of me became clear as a cascade.

Then, I could hear the bass of my name.

Then, I heard the Lord in the wilderness of my soul.

Then, stillness and stillness and stillness sang.

Samaras, Nicholas. from IMAGE, Number 59. Seattle: Centre for Religious Humanism, 2008.

some songs of mercy

from one of my favourite books of poetry:

15.

This is the way we summon one another, but it is not the way we call upon the Name. We stand in rags, we beg for tears to dissolve the immovable landmarks of hatred. How beautiful our heritage, to have this way of speaking to eternity, how bountiful this solitude, surrounded, filled, and mastered by the Name, from which all things arise in splendour, depending one upon the other.

29.

Bless the Lord, O my soul, who made you a singer in his holy house forever, who has given you a tongue like the wind, and a heart like the sea, who has journeyed you from generation to generation to this impeccable moment of sweet bewilderment. Bless the Lord who has surrounded the traffic of human interest with the majesty of his law, who has given a direction to the falling leaf, and a goal to the green shoot. tremble, my soul, before the one who creates good and evil, that a man may choose among worlds; and tremble before the furnace of light in which you are formed and to which you return, until the time when he suspends his light and withdraws into himself, and there is no world, and there is no soul anywhere. Bless the one who judges you with his strap and his mercy, who covers with a million years of dust those who say, I have not sinned. Gather me, O my soul, around your longing, and from your eternal place inform my homelessness, that I may bring you forth and husband you, and make the day a throne for your activity, and the night a tower for your watchfulness, and all my time your just dominion. Sing, my soul, to the one who moves like music, who comes down like steps of lightning, who widens space with the thought of his name, who returns like death, deep and intangible, to his own absence and his own glory. Bless the Lord, O my soul, draw down the blessing of authority, that you may invite me to uncover you, and hold you precious till I'm worn away, and we are refreshed, soul and shadow, refreshed and rested like a sundial standing in the night. Bless the Lord, O my soul, cry out toward his mercy, cry out with tears and song and every instrument, stretch yourself toward the undivided glory which he established merely as his footstool, when he created forever, and he made it-is-finished, and he signed the foundations of unity, and polished the atoms of love to shine back beams and paths and gates of return. Bless the Lord, O my soul. Bless his name forever.

47.

My soul finds its place in the Name, and my soul finds its ease in the embrace of the Name. I struggled with shapes and with numbers, and I carved with blade and brain to make a place, but I could not find a shelter for my soul. Blessed is the Name which is the safety of the soul, the spine and the shield of the innermost man, and the health of the innermost breath. I search the words that attend your mercy. You lift me out of destruction, and you win me my soul. You gather it out of the unreal by the power of your name. Blessed is the Name that unifies demand, and changes the seeking into praise. Out of the panic, out of the useless plan, I awaken to your name, and solitude to solitude all your creatures speak, and through the inaccessible intention all things fall gracefully. Blessed in the shelter of my soul, blessed is the form of mercy, blessed is the Name.

50.

I lost my way, I forgot to call upon your name. The raw heart beat against the world, and the tears were for my lost victory. But you are here. You have always been here. The world is all forgetting, and the heart is a rage of directions, but your name unifies the heart, and the world is lifted into its place. Blessed is the one who waits in the traveller's heart for his turning.

Cohen, Leonard. Songs of Mercy. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1984.

a crucifixion and a mysterion

Crucifixion

You understand the colors on the hillside have faded,

we have the gray and brown and lavender of late autumn,

the apple and pear trees have lost their leaves, the mist

of November is often with us, especially in the afternoon

and toward evening, as it was today when I sat gazing

up into the orchard for a long time the way I do now,

thinking of how I died last winter and was revived.

And I tell you I saw there a cross with a man nailed

to it, silvery in the mist, and I said to him: "Are you

the Christ?" And he must have heard me, for in his

agony, twisted as he was, he nodded his head affirmatively,

up and down, once and twice. And a little way off

I saw another cross with another man nailed to it,

twisting and nodding, and then another and another,

ranks and divisions of crosses straggling like exhausted

legions upward among the misty trees, each cross

with a silvery, writhing, twisting, nodding, naked

figure nailed to it, and some of them were women.

The hill was filled with crucifixion. Should I not be

telling you this? Is it excessive? But I know something

about death now, I know how silent it is, silent, even

when the pain is shrieking and screaming. And tonight

is very silent and very dark. When I looked I saw

nothing out there, only my own reflected head nodding

a little in the window glass. It was as if the Christ

had nodded to me, all those writhing silvery images

on the hillside, and after a while I nodded back to him.

Carruth, Hayden. "Crucifixion" The Best American Poetry 1990. Toronto: Collier Macmillan Canada, Inc., 1990.

Adventures in New Testament Greek: Mysterion

What our habit has attained for us appears

a somewhat meager view of mystery.

And Latinate equivalents have fared

no better tendering the palpable

proximity of dense noetic pressure.

More familiar, glib, and gnostic bullshit

aside, the loss the body suffers when

sacrament is pared into a tiny

picture postcard of absent circumstance

starves the matter to a moot result, no?

Mysterion is of a piece, enormous

enough to span the reach of what we see

and what we don't. The problem at the heart

of metaphor is how neatly it breaks down

to this and that. Imagine one that held

entirely across the play of image

and its likenesses. Mysterion is

never elsewhere, ever looms, indivisible

and here, and compasses a journey one

assumes as it is tendered on a spoon.

Receiving it, you apprehend how near

the Holy bides. You cannot know how far.

Cairns, Scott. "Adventures in New Testament Greek: Mysterion" New & Selected Poems. Lincoln, Nebraska: Zoo Press, 2002.

of poets and artists

Who Is a Poet

a poet is one who writes verses

and one who does not write verses

a poet is one who throws off fetters

and one who puts fetters on himself

a poet is one who believes

and one who cannot bring himself to believe

a poet is one who has told lies

and one who has been told lies

one who has been inclined to fall

and one who raises himself

a poet is one who tries to leave

and one who cannot leave

Translated from the Polish by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire

Rozewicz, Tadeusz. "Who Is a Poet" The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry. New York: Vintage Books, 1996.

What Mr. Cogito Thinks About Hell

The lowest circle of hell. Contrary to popular opinion it is inhabited neither by despots nor matricides, nor even by those who go after the bodies of others. It is the refuge of artists, full of mirrors, musical instruments, and pictures. At first glance this is the most luxurious infernal department, without tar, fire, or physical tortures.

Throughout the year competitions, festivals, and concerts are held here. There is no climax in the season. The climax is permanent and almost absolute. Every few months new trends come into being and nothing, it appears, is capable of stopping the triumphant march of the avant-garde.

Beelzebub loves art. He boasts that already his choruses, his poets, and his painters are nearly superior to those of heaven. He who has better art has better government -- that's clear. Soon they will be able to measure their strength against one another at the Festival of the Two Worlds. And then we will see what remains of Dante, Fra Angelico, and Bach.

Beelzebub supports the arts. He provides his artists with calm, good board, and absolute isolation from hellish life.

Translated from the Polish by John Carpenter and Bogdana Carpenter

Herbert, Zbigniew. "What Mr. Cogito Thinks About Hell" The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry. New York: Vintage Books, 1996.

a poem by malka heifetz tussman

Love the Ruins

With one letter of your many names

you broke in --

and now you live

your own hot life in me.

With one sound of your many names

you pierced yourself in me --

and now you feed

on my heart's blood.

Soon

you will shatter me

from within.

Then gather up the splinters,

and love the ruins,

my God.

Tussman, Malka Heifetz. "Love the Ruins" Voices Within The Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets. New York: Avon Books, 1980.

a poem by avraham ben-yitzhak

Blessed Are Those Who Sow and Do Not Reap

Blessed are those who sow and do not reap

Because they wander far.

Blessed are those who give themselves freely, the splendor

Of whose youth had added to daylight

Though they flung off their glory where roads part.

Blessed are those whose pride crosses the borders of their souls

And becomes a white humility

After the rainbow's rising in the cloud.

Blessed are those who know what their heart cries out in deserts

And on whose lips silence flowers.

Blessed are they, for they will be taken into the heart of the world

Wrapped in a cloak of unremembrance,

Forever remaining without speech.

Ben-Yitzhak, Avraham. "Blessed Are Those Who Sow and Do Not Reap" Voices Within The Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets. New York: Avon Books, 1980.

a poem by yehuda amichai

Of Three or Four in a Room

Of three or four in a room

there is always one who stands beside the window.

He must see evil sprouting among the thorns

and fires on the hill.

And how men who went out of their houses whole

are given back in the evening like small change.

Of three or four in a room

there is always one who stands beside the window.

His dark hair over his thoughts.

Behind him, words.

And in front of him voices wandering without a knapsack,

hearts without supplies, prophecies without water,

and large stones which have been returned

and remain sealed, like letters which have no

address and no one to receive them.

Amichai, Yehuda. "Of Three or Four in a Room" Voices Within The Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets. New York: Avon Books, 1980.

a poem by gad hollander

Fugato (Coda)

I made a song and placed it far, near God,

a doublewind, a song of love;

I made it out of breath, it gasped for touch.

I made it in the empty mind, a thought

of smoke, of limb and skull, of memory;

I placed it far, a poem for the pure one.

I taught my song the algebra of praise,

it sang the praise of God, it sang in a space

confined to song, far, near God.

A doublewind, a song of love,

children pranced according to its rhythm,

and all the summers heard it, the summers of smoke.

I made it in my mind, and the empty sky

soon filled, and the far places heard it;

it gasped for God, I made it out of breath.

A song, a thought, a memory of song;

I made it once, and twice, and always.

I made a song and placed it far;

it sang the praise of God, in a space confined

to breath it sang. I made my song

in the empty mind, God claimed it as his own;

the song of love,

the doublewind.

Hollander, Gad. "Fugato (Coda)" Voices Within the Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets. New York: Avon Books,1980.

a poem by mani lieb

Psalmodist

Let shrieking steel and gray stone be set

For green grass; the clash of hammer and tongs

And the rush of wheels - birdsong;

Grating of saws - the summer cricket; the pious poet -

The merchant. And as in earliest and early days

The grass will shoot its stalk through the rock

In rhythm with the cricket; and over the clanging shock

Of steel - the bird's song will range far and away.

So too the poet: pious, from market noises,

From business bustling and the wheels' clatter

He will move apart with parchment, ink and feather

To the holiness of the word, which in its commonness

Is strong - to stitch prayers for the world: to knit

The heart to God, to unbind the sorrow on silent lips.

Lieb, Mani. "Psalmodist" Voices Within the Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets. New York: Avon Books, 1980.

a poem by robert hass

Churchyard

Somerset Maugham said a professional was someone who could do his best work when he didn't particularly feel like it. There was a picture of him in the paper, a face lined deeply and morally like Auden's, an old embittered tortoise, the corners of the mouth turned down resolutely to express the idea that everything in life is small change. And what he said when he died: I'm all through, the clever young men don't write essays about me. In the fleshly world, the red tulip in the garden sunlight is almost touched by shadow and begins to close up. Someone asked me yesterday: are deer monogamous? I thought of something I had read. When deer in the British Isles were forced to live in the open because of heavy foresting, it stunted them. The red deer who lived in the Scottish highlands a thousand years ago were a third larger than the present animal. This morning, walking into the village to pick up the car, I thought of a roof where I have slept in the summer in New York, pigeons in the early morning sailing up Fifth Avenue and silence in which you imagine the empty canyons the light hasn't reached yet. I was standing on the high street in Shelford, outside the fussy little tea shop, and I thought a poem with the quick, lice-ridden pigeons in it might end: this is a dawn song in Manhattan. I hurried home to write it and, as I passed the churchyard, school was letting out. Luke was walking towards me smiling. He thought I had come to meet him. That was when I remembered the car, when he was walking toward me through the spring flowers and the eighteenth-century gravestones, his arms full of school drawings he hoped not to drop in the mud.

Hass, Robert. "Churchyard" Human Wishes. Ecco Press, 1989.

a poem by robert hilles

Dream

A boy made an appointment with God and waited for him in a church. After a few hours he knew that God wasn't coming and he learned for the first time that a god must never reveal himself even to the faithful. At first, the boy was hurt by this and stopped reading his Bible and stopped going to church. He began to have strange dreams at night of walking through the bush with a pack of wolves. In his one hand he carried the tail of a deer and in the other a rifle. Even though he walked on two feet and carried a rifle he knew that he was a wolf and that the leader of the pack was his father. In a clearing they found a vast lake and on the far shore stood an enormous moose. As he aimed his rifle his father spoke in his wolf voice saying: "You cannot shoot that moose because he is all that is left of a once powerful God. Instead you must climb onto his back and whisper into his ear the cries your mother made when you were born. Then he will recognize that you are his grandson." The boy did not listen to his father and shot the moose instead in an instant the lake was filled with blood. The wolves all fled and he was left to drown in the blood. Sometimes he wakes before he pulls the trigger other times he wakes as he tries to swim in all that blood. Each time he wakes he knows that God is trying to tell him something with that dream but he is too simple to really understand. Instead he goes back to church knowing that later a different dream will come.

Hilles, Robert. "Dream" Cantos From a Small Room. Don Mills, Ontario: Wolsac and Wynn Publishers, Inc., 1993.

another poem by stephanie bolster

Many Have Written Poems About Blackberries

But few have gotten at the multiplicity of them, how each berry

composes itself of many notes, spherical,

swollen, fragile as a world. A blackberry is the colour of a painful

bruise on the upper arm, some internal organ

as yet unnamed. It is shaped to fit

the tip of the tongue, to be a thimble, a dunce cap

for a small mouse. Sometimes it is home to a secret green worm

seeking safety and the power of surprise. Sometimes it plunks

into a river and takes on water.

Fishes nibble it.

The bushes themselves ramble like a grandmother's sentences,

giving birth to their own sharpness. Picking the berries

must be a tactful conversation

of gloved hands. Otherwise your fingers will bleed

the berries' purple tongue; otherwise thorns

will pierce your own blank skin. Best to be on the safe side,

the outside of the bush. Inside might lurk

nests of yellowjackets; rabid bats; other,

larger hands on the same search.

The flavour is its own reward, like kissing the whole world

at once, rivers, willows, bugs and all, until your swollen

lips tingle. It's like waking up

to discover the language you used to speak

is gibberish, and you have never really

loved. But this does not matter because you have

married this fruit, mellifluous, brutal, and ripe.

Bolster, Stephanie. "Many Have Written Poems About Blackberries" Two Bowls of Milk. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1999.

a poem by stephanie bolster

(from a book of poems about the relationship(s) between Alice Pleasance Liddell Hargreaves, Charles Lutwidge Dawson, Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland)

Portrait of Alice, Annotated

Who was it strung these footnotes

from her toes and scribbled

italics on her wrists, indicating perhaps

that only slim-wristed girls

were allowed to enter Wonderland?

They wound her with measuring tape,

noted the resulting data on her skin, figures

for chest and waist identical. To her mouth

was taped a parchment proclamation

detailing origins of those words she spoke

as if they were as intimately hers

as earlobes. But the evidence proved

those words had a long history of their own,

belonged to themselves and would

outlive her. Whatever she had said

to end up in this predicament

was not her fault, she was exempt, thus safe.

What could be done to her now? Even her breasts

were claimed before they'd risen; some said

he'd placed his nitrate-ridden hands there.

The critics overwrote each other

till all their words were tattooed black

upon her. Have mercy, she cried as they came

with the thousand-volumed weight of archives,

but those words were not hers either.

Bolster, Stephanie. "Portrait of Alice, Annotated" The Alice Poems. Montreal: Vehicule Press, 1998.

a poem by robert bringhurst

Kol Nidre*

Forgive me my promises. Those I have kept

and those I have broken. Forgive me

my pledges, my vows and the rest

of my boasts and concessions.

Raking my father's bones out of the long furnace, I knew

that what is is what links us. The ground

we all walk on, air we all breathe;

the rocks and trees that look down on us in all their candour -

all that remains of all that surrounded us when we were sane -

and the eyes; the hands; the silence; reciting the names

of what is in the world; divining the names

of what isn't; the wounds we inflict

to relay and mirror the wounds we receive;

and the knots we cannot undo

between father and son, daughter and mother,

mother and father, the one

God and all his believers:

the marriage made without vows

between those who have pleased

and hurt one another that deeply.

Bringhurst, Robert. "Kol Nidre" The Calling: Selected Poems 1970-1995. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1995.

* n. Judaism

1. An opening prayer recited on the eve of Yom Kippur, retroactively or preemptively declaring the annulment of all personal vows made to God in the previous or following year.
2. The melody to which such a prayer is chanted.

one more day by czeslaw milosz

One More Day

Comprehension of good and evil is given in the running of the blood.

In a child's nestling close to its mother, she is security and warmth,

In night fears when we are small, in dread of the beast's fangs and in the terror of dark rooms,

In youthful infatuations where childhood delight find completion.

And should we discredit the idea for its modest origins?

Or should we say plainly that good is on the side of the living

And evil on the side of a doom that lurks to devour us?

Yes, good is an ally of being and the mirror of evil is nothing,

Good is brightness, evil darkness, good high, evil low,

According to the nature of our bodies, of our language.

The same could be said of beauty. It should not exist.

There is not only no reason for it, but an argument against.

Yet undoubtedly it is, and is different from ugliness.

The voices of birds outside the window when they greet the morning

And iridescent stripes of light blazing on the floor,

Or the horizon with a wavy line where the peach-colored sky and the dark-blue mountain meet.

Or the architecture of a tree, the slimness of a column crowned with green.

All that, hasn't it been invoked for centuries

As mystery which, in one instant, will be suddenly revealed?

And the old artist thinks that all his life he has only trained his hand.

One more day and he will enter the core as one enters a flower.

And though the good is weak, beauty is very strong.

Nonbeing sprawls, everywhere it turns into ash whole expanses of being,

It masquerades in shapes and colors that imitate existence

And no one would know it, if they did not know that it was ugly.

And when people cease to believe that there is good and evil

Only beauty will call to them and save them

So that they will still know how to say: this is true and that is false.

Milosz, Czeslaw. "One More Day" New and Collected Poems 1931-2001. New York" HarperCollins Publishers, Inc, 2001.

of politics, & art - a poem by norman dubie

Of Politics, & Art

Here, on the farthest point of the peninsula

The winter storm

Off the Atlantic shook the schoolhouse.

Mrs. Whitimore, dying

Of tuberculosis, said it would be after dark

Before the snowplow and bus would reach us.

She read to us from Melville.

How in an almost calamitous moment

Of sea hunting

Some men in an open boat suddenly found themselves

At the still and protected center

Of a great herd of whales

Where all the females floated on their sides

While their young nursed there. The cold frightened whalers

Just stared into what they allowed

Was the ecstatic lapidary pond of a nursing cow's

One visible eyeball.

And they were at peace with themselves.

Today I listened to a woman say

That Melville might

Be taught in the next decade. Another woman asked, "And why not?"

The first responded, "Because there are

No women in his one novel."

And Mrs. Whitimore was now reading from the Psalms.

Coughing into her handkerchief. Snow above the windows.

There was a blue light on her face, breasts and arms.

Sometimes a whole civilization can be dying

Peacefully in one young woman, in a small heated room

With thirty children

Rapt, confident and listening to the pure

God rendering voice of a storm.

Dubie, Norman. "Of Politics, & Art" The Best American Poetry 1990. Don Mills: Collier Macmillan Canada, Inc., 1990.