To behold God’s creation and to praise it with language is this poem—and it is also the poem’s subject. For what is God’s creation to the devoted poet but a reminder that, as a piece of that creation, she herself is an instrument of God in service of love? To sense creation’s magnificence, to point others to it, to love it by being dedicated to making art that praises it—and to do so with humility. It is, as Cording so... Read more
A few years ago, we invited the newest neighbor in our rural intentional Christian community to help us slaughter the chickens we had raised for meat. Our neighbor told us about his guest up the hill; he was visiting from the city and he was a strict ethical vegan. Our neighbor warned his vegan friend, whom I will call Tim, what would be happening down the hill that afternoon. So early that morning, Tim visited the doomed fowl and blessed... Read more
The hardest part of watching Boyhood for me wasn’t the film itself but going back to the main menu. You’ve just been immersed in this family’s life for twelve years, and now suddenly you see select moments of that life assembled together in a collage of stills as that soft, wistful song, “Hero,” plays: So let me go I don’t wanna be your hero I don’t wanna be a big man I just wanna fight like everyone else. And the... Read more
“Writing poems is a duel / that no one wins…” As I’m reading the poem that opens with these words, I think: this could be describing my life. The poem is called “Writing Poems.” It’s by the superb contemporary Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, in his new collection, Unseen Hand. And in fact, nearly all the poems in this collection could be describing my life—because the “duel” that Zagajewski refers to is between opposites that battle each other, or sometimes balance... Read more
This is a poem to stretch the mind. It begins by stretching our imagination to a cosmic event: a “moondog,” which is a rare bright spot in the moon’s halo. It’s formed by a “mirage of light & cloud & ice”—an image which then brings the speaker down to earth, into his own life. But this life, as he sees it, is stretched among mind-bending options: for instance, he’s “not willing to lose / that which I cannot keep/ for... Read more
Continued from yesterday and Tuesday. In Hunger Mountain: A Field Guide to Mind and Landscape, David Hinton observes, “We tend to ignore the disappearing, the forgetfulness, but all day long, day in and day out, forgetfulness keeps us woven into dragon’s traceless transformations.” The dragon, he explained earlier, is “China’s mythological embodiment of all creation and all destruction, the ten thousand hunger-driven things tumbling through their traceless transformations. “Self, that center of identity,” Hinton continues, “is a denial of dragon... Read more
Continued from yesterday. I dive into the pool. My body remembers water. My body remembers how to swim. My arm swings overhead, my arm follows through, my hand plunges into the water, pushing water, propelling my body forward down the lane. It seems to happen naturally, automatically. I don’t need to think to swim. I don’t need to remember how to swim, what to do next with my arm, my legs, my breathing. Even when I try, I can’t catch... Read more
I remember my social security number. I remember the combination to a lock—13 right, 27 left, 5 right—that rusted beyond use some years ago. How many years? I don’t remember. But I remember this: it was two locks ago. I remember the name of the city in which I was born. I remember the name of my elementary school. Turns out that this information is useful beyond merely contributing to my still unfolding (fortunately) personal story. City in which I... Read more
For Gregory Wolfe The following is an excerpt from Meis’s new book Dead People, published June 24 by Zero Books. Leszek Kolakowski died July 17, 2009. He was a philosopher, a man of letters, historian of ideas. He lived the twentieth century life. It sucked. But like many a Pole, he made the best of a bad situation. The opening lines of the Polish National Anthem are, after all, “Poland has not yet perished.” Poles know that everything will... Read more
I have a complicated relationship with the sun, having grown up in southern California and now making my home in the moody Pacific Northwest. I swerve between desperation for even an hour of brightness and a stoic claim that my poet-soul finally feels at home in this rain-soaked climate. So Betsy Sholl’s poem about the longing for light—and its frustration by winter’s darkness—feels like it’s speaking directly to me, even as the lengthening days pitch us toward summer solstice. The... Read more
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