NPM: Dana Gioia yet again

OK, so I have been on a little Dana Gioia kick.  Who can blame me?



The Angel with the Broken Wing by Dana Gioia

I am the Angel with the Broken Wing,
The one large statue in this quiet room.
The staff finds me too fierce, and so they shut
Faith’s ardor in this air-conditioned tomb.

The docents praise my elegant design
Above the chatter of the gallery.
Perhaps I am a masterpiece of sorts—
The perfect emblem of futility.

Mendoza carved me for a country church.
(His name’s forgotten now except by me.)
I stood beside a gilded altar where
The hopeless offered God their misery.

I heard their women whispering at my feet—
Prayers for the lost, the dying, and the dead.
Their candles stretched my shadows up the wall,
And I became the hunger that they fed.

I broke my left wing in the Revolution
(Even a saint can savor irony)
When troops were sent to vandalize the chapel.
They hit me once—almost apologetically.

For even the godless feel something in a church,
A twinge of hope, fear? Who knows what it is?
A trembling unaccounted by their laws,
An ancient memory they can’t dismiss.

There are so many things I must tell God!
The howling of the damned can’t reach so high.
But I stand like a dead thing nailed to a perch,
A crippled saint against a painted sky.

NPM: Dana Gioia again

Litany by Dana Gioia

This is a litany of lost things,
a canon of possessions dispossessed,
a photograph, an old address, a key.
It is a list of words to memorize
or to forget–of amo, amas, amat,
the conjugations of a dead tongue
in which the final sentence has been spoken.
This is the liturgy of rain,
falling on mountain, field, and ocean–
indifferent, anonymous, complete–
of water infinitesimally slow,
sifting through rock, pooling in darkness,
gathering in springs, then rising without our agency,
only to dissolve in mist or cloud or dew.

This is a prayer to unbelief,
to candles guttering and darkness undivided,
to incense drifting into emptiness.
It is the smile of a stone Madonna
and the silent fury of the consecrated wine,
a benediction on the death of a young god,
brave and beautiful, rotting on a tree.

This is a litany to earth and ashes,
to the dust of roads and vacant rooms,
to the fine silt circling in a shaft of sun,
settling indifferently on books and beds.
This is a prayer to praise what we become,
"Dust thou art, to dust thou shalt return."
Savor its taste–the bitterness of earth and ashes.

This is a prayer, inchoate and unfinished,
for you, my love, my loss, my lesion,
a rosary of words to count out time's
illusions, all the minutes, hours, days
the calendar compounds as if the past
existed somewhere–like an inheritance
still waiting to be claimed.

Until at last it is our litany, mon vieux,
my reader, my voyeur, as if the mist
steaming from the gorge, this pure paradox,
the shattered river rising as it falls–
splintering the light, swirling it skyward,
neither transparent nor opaque but luminous,
even as it vanishes–were not our life.

Happy Resurrection Day

The Dawning. By George Herbert, 1633

Awake sad heart, whom sorrow ever drowns;
       Take up thine eyes, which feed on earth;
Unfold thy forehead gather’d into frowns:
       Thy Saviour comes, and with him mirth:
                                       Awake, awake;
And with a thankfull heart his comforts take.
       But thou dost still lament, and pine, and crie;
       And feel his death, but not his victorie.
Arise sad heart; if thou dost not withstand,
       Christs resurrection thine may be:
Do not by hanging down break from the hand,
       Which as it riseth, raiseth thee:
                                       Arise, Arise;
And with his buriall-linen drie thine eyes:
       Christ left his grave-clothes, that we might, when grief
       Draws tears, or bloud, not want an handkerchief.

NPM: Stricken, Smitten and Afflicted

Lyrics by Thomas Kelley, 1804

NPM: Ah, Holy Jesus

Ah, Holy Jesus by Johann Heermann, 1630; translated by Robert Seymor Bridges, 1897

Ah, holy Jesus, how hast thou offended,
that we to judge thee have in hate pretended?
By foes derided, by thine own rejected,
O most afflicted!

Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon thee?
Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee!
'Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee;
I crucified thee.

Lo, the Good Shepherd for the sheep is offered;
the slave hath sinned, and the Son hath suffered.
For our atonement, while we nothing heeded,
God interceded.

For me, kind Jesus, was thy incarnation,
thy mortal sorrow, and thy life's oblation;
thy death of anguish and thy bitter passion,
for my salvation.

Therefore, kind Jesus, since I cannot pay thee,
I do adore thee, and will ever pray thee,
think on thy pity and thy love unswerving,
not my deserving.

National Poetry Month: Dana Gioia

I am trying to post poetry several times a week (if not daily) for National Poetry Month.  I came across this beautiful poem recently, and both loved it and related to it.  But when I read it aloud to friends, it made me cry.  As one friend said, "That's because poetry cuts us to the quick."

Indeed.

Majority by Dana Gioia 

Now you’d be three,
I said to myself,
seeing a child born
the same summer as you. 

Now you’d be six,
or seven, or ten.
I watched you grow
in foreign bodies. 

Leaping into a pool, all laughter,
or frowning over a keyboard,
but mostly just standing,
taller each time. 

How splendid your most
mundane action seemed
in these joyful proxies.
I often held back tears. 

Now you are twenty-one.
Finally, it makes sense
that you have moved away
into your own afterlife.

Wednesday, but with words

In honor of National Poetry Month, I hope to share lots of poems in April.  Below is my regular Wednesday post of photos, but for this month, I will start by painting pictures with words.  Today, I offer a favorite: Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins. And to accompany are photos from our hike a couple of weeks ago, about 3 miles from my house.

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;	5
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:	10
Praise him.