Little Gidding

(Old Bell Tower, 1905, by Edward Curtis,
1868-1952, American photographer)

Today is Ash Wednesday, in the Christian calendar the first day of Lent, the forty-day period of prayer, penance, and fasting in preparation for Easter. On this day, ashes are placed on the foreheads of the faithful as a reminder from Genesis 3:19 that “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

(It is in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, not in the Bible, where we find those famous phrases, “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”)

from LITTLE GIDDING

If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

~ T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), American-born English poet, playwright, and editor, and winner of the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature

What’s in My Journal

(Toleware document box, Pennsylvania, nineteenth-century)

“Time past and time future / What might have been and what has been . . .” ~ T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), American-born English poet, playwright, and editor, from Burnt Norton

WHAT’S IN MY JOURNAL

Odd things, like a button drawer. Mean
Things, fishhooks, barbs in your hand.
But marbles too. A genius for being agreeable.
Junkyard crucifixes, voluptuous
discards. Space of knickknacks, and for
Alaska. Evidence to hang me, or to beatify.
Clues that lead nowhere, that never connected
anyway. Deliberate obfuscation, the kind
that takes genius. Chasms in our character.
Loud omissions. Mornings that yawn above
a new grave. Pages you know exist
but you can’t find them. Someone’s terribly
inevitable life story, maybe mine.

~ William Stafford (1914-1992), American poet

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe

(Women and Children, 1990 by Miriam Qiyuk, born 1933, Canadian Inuit sculptor)

“Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” ~ T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), American-born English poet, playwright, and editor

ARS POETICA #100: I BELIEVE

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown¹ said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”),
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here or there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love
and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

~ Elizabeth Alexander, born 1962, American poet, playwright, and essayist

¹ Sterling Brown – (1901-1989) American poet and folklorist active in the Harlem Renaissance

O May I Join the Choir Invisible

(High Cross at Clonmacnoise, Ireland)

Today is known as All Souls’ Day or The Day of the Dead. In many countries on this day, families pray for the repose of the souls of their loved ones and decorate their graves.

from O MAY I JOIN THE CHOIR INVISIBLE

O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence: live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
For miserable aims that end with self,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge man’s search
To vaster issues.

~ George Eliot (1819-1880), pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans, English novelist, poet, and translator