Wednesday of Easter Week : Anointing

 

Rose Datoc Dall

The Anointing at Bethany (Wednesday)

Come close with Mary, Martha , Lazarus

So close the candles stir with their soft breath

And kindle heart and soul to flame within us

Lit by these mysteries of life and death.

For beauty now begins the final movement

In quietness and intimate encounter

The alabaster jar of precious ointment

Is broken open for the world’s true lover,

 

The whole room richly fills to feast the senses

With all the yearning such a fragrance brings,

The heart is mourning but the spirit dances,

Here at the very centre of all things,

Here at the meeting place of love and loss

We all foresee, and see beyond the cross.

 

Malcolm Guite

Tuesday of Easter Week

 

Enrique Simonet

Jesus weeps 

- Malcolm Guite

Jesus comes near and he beholds the city

And looks on us with tears in his eyes,

And wells of mercy, streams of love and pity

Flow from the fountain whence all things arise.

He loved us into life and longs to gather

And meet with his beloved face to face

How often has he called, a careful mother,

And wept for our refusals of his grace,

Wept for a world that, weary with its weeping,

Benumbed and stumbling, turns the other way,

Fatigued compassion is already sleeping

Whilst her worst nightmares stalk the light of day.

But we might waken yet, and face those fears,

If we could see ourselves through Jesus’ tears.

To hear Malcom read his poem, go to

https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/

William Brassey Hole

Monday of Passion Week Poetry

 

Andrei Miranov

Cleansing the Temple  

-Malcolm Guite

Come to your Temple here with liberation

And overturn these tables of exchange

Restore in me my lost imagination

Begin in me for good, the pure change.

Come as you came, an infant with your mother,

That innocence may cleanse and claim this ground

Come as you came, a boy who sought his father

With questions asked and certain answers found,

Come as you came this day, a man in anger

Unleash the lash that drives a pathway through

Face down for me the fear,  the shame, the danger;

Teach me again to whom my love is due.

Break down in me the barricades of death

And tear the veil in two with your last breath

To hear Malcom read his poem, go to

https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/the-cleansing-of-the-temple/

Raymond Blaze

The Cleansing of the Temple

Dan Doyle


Look at “this brave o;erhanging firmament,

This majestic roof fretted with fire.”*

These wild woodlands with their secret,

Sun-shadowed meadows, where the air

Trembles with many-voiced prayers;

These mighty and broad-backed seas

That come ashore in their endless waves,

Bending their hoary foreheads down

To touch the pebbled strands in humble obeisance;



These desert places, broad with silences

Breathless with heat during the days

And wearing their diadems of numberless stars

From horizon to horizon through the nights;

These tropics, their jungle blanketed hills

Exploding with life and vigorous intent;

Are these not the many rooms of my Father’s Temple,

The dwelling places of the infinite Word?



Are they not the very revelation of

That genesis word, that holy Yes,

That spoke all things into being,

That still breathes Being softly into the now?

Is it not present in all places, at all times?

Why, then, do you sully it so?

Hear me now, and again, my children.

I am that Word, and as the scriptures said,

“Zeal for this house will devour me.”



Why have you turned My sanctuaries into dens?

Why do you no longer hear the Yes I whisper

Within and through all of these places, even now?

“Take this filth you have brought here out.

Stop turning my Father’s House

Into a marketplace, filling its sanctuaries

With this feral din of trade and greed.”

Do you not know that I made each of you

A temple, a vessel of My infinite Yes,

That I wish to dwell in you too?

But you have turned yourselves into

Hovels, jests, paeans to your own egos.


Why have you turned so willfully

Toward that foolish one who cried “No”?



* Hamlet, Act II, scene II

17th C Ethiopian

Palm Sunday Poetry

Palm Sunday

by Michael Guite

Now to the gate of my Jerusalem,

The seething holy city of my heart,

The saviour comes. But will I welcome him?

Oh crowds of easy feelings make a start;

They raise their hands, get caught up in the singing,

And think the battle won. Too soon they’ll find

The challenge, the reversal he is bringing

Changes their tune. I know what lies behind

The surface flourish that so quickly fades;

Self-interest, and fearful guardedness,

The hardness of the heart, its barricades,

And at the core, the dreadful emptiness

Of a perverted temple. Jesus  come

Break my resistance and make me your home.

Love’s as Warm as Tears

C.S. Lewis

Love’s as warm as tears,

Love is tears:

Pressure within the brain,

Tension at the throat,

Deluge, weeks of rain,

Haystacks afloat,

Featureless seas between

Hedges, where once was green.

Love’s as fierce as fire,

Love is fire:

All sorts–Infernal heat

Clinkered with greed and pride,

Lyric desire, sharp-sweet,

Laughing, even when denied,

And that empyreal flame

Whence all loves came.

Love’s as fresh as spring,

Love is spring:

Bird-song in the air,

Cool smells in a wood,

Whispering “Dare! Dare!”

To sap, to blood,

Telling “Ease, safety, rest,

Are good; not best.”

Love’s as hard as nails,

Love is nails:

Blunt, thick, hammered through

The medial nerves of One

Who, having made us, knew

The thing He had done,

Seeing (what all that is)

Our cross, and His.

Easter Poetry for the Saturday before Palm Sunday

Raising of Lazarus : mosaic from Ravenna, Italy

 The Raising of Lazarus

BY FRANZ WRIGHT
Adapted from the original notebook fragment written by Rainer Maria Rilke in Spain in 1913.

Evidently, this was needed. Because people need
to be screamed at with proof.
But he knew his friends. Before they were
he knew them. And they knew
that he would never leave them
there, desolate. So he let his exhausted eyes close
at first glimpse of the village fringed with tall fig
trees — 
immediately he found himself in their midst:
here was Martha, sister of the dead
boy. He knew
she would not stray,
as he knew which would;
he knew that he would always find her
at his right hand,
and beside her
her sister Mary . . . Yes,
all were gathered around him. And once again
he began to explain
to bewildered upturned faces
where it was he had to go, and why.
He called them “my friends.” The Logos, God’s
creating word, — the same voice that said
Let there be light.
Yet
when he opened his eyes,
he found himself standing apart.
Even the two
slowly backing away, as though
from concern for their good name.
Then he began to hear voices;
whispering
quite distinctly,
or thinking:
Lord,
if you had been here
our friend might not have died.
(At that, he slowly reached out
as though to touch a face,
and soundlessly started to cry.)
He asked them the way to the grave.
And he followed behind them,
preparing
to do what is not done
to that green silent place
where life and death are one.
By then other Brueghelian grotesques
had gathered, toothlessly sneering
across at each other and stalled
at some porpoise or pig stage
of ontogenetical horrorshow, keeping
their own furtive shadowy distances
and struggling to keep up
like packs of limping dogs;
merely to walk down this road
in broad daylight
had begun to feel illegal,
unreal, rehearsal,
test — but for what!
And the filth of desecration
sifting down over him, as a feverish outrage
rose up, contempt
at the glib ease
with which words like “living”
and “being dead”
rolled off their tongues;
and loathing flooded his body
when he hoarsely cried,
“Move the stone!”
“By now the body must stink,”
some helpfully suggested. But it was true
that the body had lain in its grave four days.
He heard the voice as if from far away,
beginning to fill with that gesture
which rose through him: no hand that heavy
had ever reached this height, shining
an instant in air. Then
all at once clenching
and cramped — the fingers
shrunk crookedly
into themselves,
and irreparably fixed there,
like a hand with scars of ghastly
slashing lacerations
and the usual deep sawing
across the wrist’s fret,
through all major nerves,
the frail hair-like nerves — 
so his hand
at the thought
all the dead might return
from that tomb
where the enormous cocoon
of the corpse was beginning to stir.
Yet nobody stood there — 
only the one young man,
pale as though bled,
stooping at the entrance
and squinting at the light,
picking at his face, loose
strips of rotting shroud.
All that he could think of
was a dark place to lie down,
and hide that wasted body.
And tears rolled up his cheek
and back into his eyes,
and then his eyes began
rolling back into his head ...    
Peter looked across at Jesus
with an expression that seemed to say
You did it, or What have you done?
And everyone saw
how their vague and inaccurate
life made room for his once more.

[RHS note: at the ellipsis I have removed a lie about Mary.]

God’s Grandeur
Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; 

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed.   Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Easter Poetry for Friday before Palm Sunday

 

Christ of St John of the Cross     by Salvador Dali

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

Breath of Life by J. Kirk Richards

 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