2023.05.14 Be a Poem, Lyn G. Brakeman, Spiritual Lemons, blog post

To be a poem is not the same as to write a poem. Being a poem takes lightness of mind and soul, weightless wisdom, boldness of heart. In other words, the branches are less weighty, but more supple, lithe, and limber than the vine. Together they create great spiritual choreography. Such is the embracing way of our mothering God.

*  *  *  *  

She had some horses she loved.

She had some horses she hated.

They were the same horses. 

Joy Harjo

A NAME

When Eve walked among

the animals and named them—

nightingale, red-shouldered hawk

fiddler crab, fallow deer—

I wonder if she ever named

them to speak back, looked into 

their wide wonderful eyes and

whispered, Name me, name me.  

Ada Limón

INSTRUCTIONS ON NOT GIVING UP

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out

of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s 

almost obscene display of cherry limb shoving

their cotton-candy colored blossoms to the slate

sky of spring rains, it’s greening of the trees

that really gets to me. When all the shock of white

and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave

the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,

the leaves come. Patient, plodding,  green skin

growing over whatever winter did to us, a return

to the strange idea of continuous living despite

the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,

I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf

unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

Ada Limón

BREATH IN ME

Breathe in me, breath of God

healing my lungs’ disease

So that I may in purest love

breathe in, and breath out with thee.

Breathe in me, breath of God,

For when my life is done

And my sweet lungs lose all their pow’r

My last breath and yours are one.

Lyn G. Brakeman (after Hymn #508)

And then the plant, fresh charged, would be

itself a vein of grace,

a way the keeper might extend

a hopeful, green embrace,

connecting child and foe and friend,

co-mingled and entwined,

to be and bear the fruit of god

in one life-giving vine. 

Michael Hudson

* * * *

And such are the many and varied ways of affectionate naming, guiding, breathing, mothering we recognize and celebrate on this 2023 MOTHERS’ DAY. 

2017.03.12 Life's Blood—Born and Born again and Again

God, I feel sure, has many wombs. One is the baptismal font. Womb-like, it evokes birth and is filled with water, which breaks when we emerge. We are sealed by baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.

Another is the womb of Earth, the planet we call our island home. From it we derive all our nourishment and a full supply of water and air for Life. We cannot sustain biological life without this womb. It must be born again and again. Too often we take it for granted and abuse its rich yield— to our peril and to our shame.

Another womb is the womb of Incarnation: the womb of our own flesh out of which we birth God’s life over and over again. We live in this womb all our life, and each time we connect with enlivening feelings, we are born again. 

Finally, there is the womb of the tomb. From that womb, God births us back into Life forever in God’s own soul.

Here are two poems that bring the mystical experience of being born— and born again—down to  flesh and blood and embodying divinity at once. Both are by the Rev. Regina Walton, a colleague, poet, and Episcopal priest in the diocese of Massachusetts. Regina is the author of The Yearning Life. Poems 2016, Paraclete Press. With her permission and with gratitude, I share these poems.


AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL POEM

I started out small
And got smaller.
Loved, humiliated, self-enclosed.

Some days lifting up my hands,
Others carrying my cross
where my shoulders meet spine.

I was knit together,
And know I’ve knit someone else
Thoughtlessly

Not that it happened without a thought,
But surely
It wasn’t the thoughts that did it.

I bled out when he arrived,
So they filled me back up
With the blood of another.

Now I am the same
By half.
Thank you


FIRST DAY
   
The baby: hale and pink and strong and fine.
But beached and bleached, you are much less sanguine
And so, two pints of blood by plastic line
Leach their slow way into your opened vein.
The scarlet bags like lungs suspended from
The scarecrow pole, unwanted hanger-on
This trinity: child, mater, sire gone
To sleep in a hard chair.

                                     Now the bald sum
Of all your pains naps in a plastic bin.
Your web of tubes a tether to the bed;
The buzzing, ringing, beeping, healing din.
Who thought, on your first day, who expected
So soon, to find so much of yourself gone?
In time, you will get used to being wrong.



from Songs for the Cycle by Michael Hudson.

. . .Seek to grow as all things grow
and trust what grace assumes—
That time will manifest the Life
Received within the womb.