fromtheabundance

[fromtheabundance]

[fromtheabundance]

ruslan amurskiy

[fromtheabundance]

Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks

BY JANE KENYON

I am the blossom pressed in a book, found again after two hundred years. ...

I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper....

When the young girl who starves sits down to a table she will sit beside me....

I am food on the prisoner's plate. ...

I am water rushing to the wellhead, filling the pitcher until it spills...

I am the patient gardener of the dry and weedy garden...

I am the stone step, the latch, and the working hinge....

I am the heart contracted by joy. ... the longest hair, white before the rest....

I am there in the basket of fruit presented to the widow. ...

I am the musk rose opening

unattended, the fern on the boggy summit. ...

I am the one whose love

overcomes you, already with you when you think to call my name....

[fromtheabundance]

Our Golden Hour

The hand of our golden hour strikes as we find our way home; wrapped in the familiar ache of that yellow-warm embrace,

Like the soft bruises that make you laugh.

The longing of grief is to return to moments like these, when the smiling light held us while we held each other.

The tender sweetness of loss is having held this light together, until even the brightest memories darken against new horizons.

And the hope of even these words will fail, when, daughter, your richest hours will not be ours.

[fromtheabundance]

Holy Sonnet XIV: Batter my heart, three-person'd God

BY JOHN DONNE

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new. I, like an usurp'd town to another due, Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end; Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue. Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain, But am betroth'd unto your enemy; Divorce me, untie or break that knot again, Take me to you, imprison me, for I, Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

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(via Friends & Frames — Visvaldas Morkevicius)

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BEACHY HEAD, 2019 Ross J. Platt

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Make no mistake: if he rose at all It was as His body; If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit, The amino acids rekindle, The Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers, Each soft spring recurrent; It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the Eleven apostles; It was as His flesh; ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes The same valved heart That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered Out of enduring Might New strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence, Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded Credulity of earlier ages: Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache, Not a stone in a story, But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of Time will eclipse for each of us The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb, Make it a real angel, Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in The dawn light, robed in real linen Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed By the miracle, And crushed by remonstrance.

John Updike, Seven Stanzas at Easter

[fromtheabundance]

The Dipper

By Kathleen Jamie

It was winter, near freezing, I’d walked through a forest of firs when I saw issue out of the waterfall a solitary bird.

It lit on a damp rock, and, as water swept stupidly on, wrung from its own throat supple, undammable song.

It isn’t mine to give. I can’t coax this bird to my hand that knows the depth of the river yet sings of it on land.

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Rory Gardiner

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Ebrahim Bahaa-Eldin

[fromtheabundance]

Love like Salt

by Lisel Mueller

It lies in our hands in crystals 

too intricate to decipher 

It goes into the skillet 

without being given a second thought 

It spills on the floor so fine 

we step all over it 

We carry a pinch behind each eyeball 

It breaks out on our foreheads 

We store it inside our bodies 

in secret wineskins 

At supper, we pass it around the table 

talking of holidays and the sea.

[fromtheabundance]

RIVERS

Tell me, when did our bodies forget how to dance? How to move and how to play and take wild chances like our children do in their bodies? Like the hills rising up to meet them? Like the air breathing life in their lungs?

Lungs like gulping largemouth bass drinking in the rivers. Rivers like living waters moving through the world— falling down and baptizing us from the sky. Sky like sprawling blue mountains— laying across the horizons like bodies.

Bodies we have forgotten how to use: to be caught up in rhythms, to be alive in the work, to be bent over the land— plucking heirlooms up from the earth to feed our singing mouths.

Mouths exalting on Sundays and lulling our babes to sleep at night: “Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus,” in the heat of the dark, in the bend of our arms— holding our children who have not yet forgotten the rivers.

[fromtheabundance]