Easter Poetry for Friday before Palm Sunday

 

Father Forgive

 By Malcolm Guite    (bio information below) 

Luke 23:34 Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.

 

Father forgive, and so forgiveness flows;

Flows from the very wound our hatred makes,

Flows through the taunts, the curses and the blows,

Flows through our wasted world, a healing spring,

Welling and cleansing, washing all the marks

Away, the scores and scars of every wrong.

 

Forgiveness flows to where we need it most:

Right in the pit and smithy of our sin,

Just where the dreadful nails are driven in,

Just where our woundedness has done its worst.

We know your cry of pain should be a curse,

Yet turn to you and find we have been blessed.

We know not what we do, but Heaven knows

For every sin on earth, forgiveness flows.

Guite is a poet-priest and Chaplain of Girton College Cambridge, but he often travels round Great Britain, and to North America, to give lectures, concerts and poetry readings.  For more details of these and other engagements go to his Events Page. You can read more about who he is and what he does on the Interviews Page.

Type the title to each of his poems into the search box on this page and you can HEAR him read his own poetry.   https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/

 

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Easter Poetry for Thursday before Palm Sunday

 I: Easter Hymn

A.E. Housman

If in that Syrian garden, ages slain,
You sleep, and know not you are dead in vain,
Nor even in dreams behold how dark and bright
Ascends in smoke and fire by day and night
The hate you died to quench and could but fan,
Sleep well and see no morning, son of man.

But if, the grave rent and the stone rolled by,
At the right hand of majesty on high
You sit, and sitting so remember yet
Your tears, your agony and bloody sweat,
Your cross and passion and the life you gave,
Bow hither out of heaven and see and save.

Art by J Kirk Richards

Easter Poetry and last class of the semester

Art by Walter Rane 

Hi: just writing to say that today is the final Salem Stake Institute class for the semester: we'll start up again in the fall with the general epistles and the Book of Revelation.

Past classes are available at
 https://www.salemzion.org/stake-institute/new-testament.

I may be posting some powerpoints with audio between now and then: subscribe to my YouTube channel (Rebecca Holt Stay Youtube) to get automatic notifications.  That is also where you can find hundreds of past classes in video or audio formats.

Each day for the next week, I will be sending out emails of Easter poetry; these will also be posted to Facebook.

If you want to receive these by email, please let me know and I will add you to that list.

Today's poem is 

John 1:14

 by Jorge Luis Borges

 

This page will be no less a riddle

than those of My holy books

or those others repeated

by ignorant mouths

believing them the handiwork of a man,

not the Spirit’s dark mirrors.

I who am the Was, the Is, and the Is To Come

again condescend to the written word,

which is time in succession and no more than an emblem.

 

Who plays with a child plays with something

near and mysterious;

wanting once to play with My children,

I stood among them with awe and tenderness.

I was born of a womb

by an act of magic.

I lived under a spell, imprisoned in a body,

in the humbleness of a soul.

I knew memory,

that coin that’s never twice the same.

I knew hope and fear,

those twin faces of the uncertain future.

I knew wakefulness, sleep, dreams,

ignorance, the flesh,

reason’s roundabout labyrinths,

the friendship of men,

the blind devotion of dogs.

I was loved, understood, praised, and hung from a cross.

I drank My cup to the dregs.

My eyes saw what they had never seen—

night and its many stars.

I knew things smooth and gritty, uneven and rough,

the taste of honey and apple,

water in the throat of thirst,

the weight of metal in the hand,

the human voice, the sound of footsteps on the grass,

the smell of rain in Galilee,

the cry of birds on high.

I knew bitterness as well.

I have entrusted the writing of these words to a common man;

they will never be what I want to say

but only their shadow.

These signs are dropped from My eternity.

Let someone else write the poem, not he who is now its scribe.

Tomorrow I shall be a great tree in Asia,

or a tiger among tigers

preaching My law to the tiger’s woods.

Sometimes homesick, I think back

on the smell of that carpenter’s shop.

 

Translated from the Spanish by Norman Thomas di Giovanni