To Mother Earth, With Love: A (Late in the Day) Valentine

What you looking at Mr./Ms. Owl? And why can I barely see you when I look back?

When asking myself or others the “big questions” in life about purpose, justice, spirit or the Spirit, security and tradition vs. monumental change, belief and believing, how, why, if…I sometimes get nowhere with prose, written or spoken. There’s just too much of it, especially now.

We are on the crest of transitioning into so many worlds and ways of being so different from those we have ever known, in our own Church, yes, but especially in our relationship to the earth and its people and creatures. Prose is just not expansive enough.

Poetry, however, just may be. Relying on its promise to present us with a new way of seeing and knowing, poetry may offer clarity we never saw coming, queries we never considered asking, insight, inspiration, refreshment…and maybe even answers?

Nobel prize winning American poet Louise Gluck, for instance, offers us a “winter” with which we are very familiar these days. With poignant questions almost like lamentations, she tries to stamp out the worst of these days by reaching out for the best that has happened or could happen. Will we finally get it right? Will we finally be as “necessary to the earth” as we once might have been? It’s all in the if and the what we harvest; can vines be valentines”:

            “October”

Is it winter again, is it cold again,

didn’t Frank just slip on the ice,

didn’t he heal, weren’t the spring seeds planted

didn’t the night end,

didn’t the melting ice

flood the narrow gutters

wasn’t my body

rescued, wasn’t it safe

didn’t the scar form, invisible

above the injury

terror and cold,

didn’t they just end, wasn’t the back garden

harrowed and planted—

I remember how the earth felt, red and dense,

in stiff rows, weren’t the seeds planted,

didn’t vines climb the south wall

I can’t hear your voice

for the wind’s cries, whistling over the bare ground

I no longer care

what sound it makes

when was I silenced, when did it first seem

pointless to describe that sound

what it sounds like can’t change what it is—

didn’t the night end, wasn’t the earth

safe when it was planted

didn’t we plant the seeds,

weren’t we necessary to the earth,

the vines, were they harvested?

Poet Langston Hughes writing a longer time ago (as you can see by the next poem’s title) intertwines rivers with the lives of all those who sat beside them or lived upon them and then posts a valentine to their transformed souls:

The Negro Speaks of Rivers 

I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:

Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

How beautiful and poignant a new way of seeing can be. Like the owl in the picture, so many of us are wrapped so tightly in our familiar rough worlds, we cannot see for looking the way the owl or the poet can. Maybe we do need poetry to add an owl’s symbolic wisdom to our seeing and looking just when we need it most.  

The final Valentine poem is to one of “mother” nature’s smaller creatures. By the way, I do love that nature is described most often in feminine terms or, even better, gender neutral terms. It’s another boost for all of us who want that kind of inclusion and emphasis in all aspects of our lives.

On behalf of all of us who have been treated as “minor birds” in our own Church, I offer to our suppressors this poem by Robert Frost. Let it be for them yet another wake up call:  

A Minor Bird

I have wished a bird would fly away,
And not sing by my house all day;

Have clapped my hands at him from the door
When it seemed as if I could bear no more.

The fault must partly have been in me.
The bird was not to blame for his key.

And of course there must be something wrong
In wanting to silence any song.