and the grains contain the fragments of all i was
and the grains enfold the vision of what i will become
only now is the slipping through the tiny space
only now is the heady rush of the cascading descent
soon to come the fullness of the end
soon to come the containment of the whole
then no more escape
then no more the falling falling sand
in the finishing only clarity
in the finishing only sight
only now is the slipping through the tiny space
only now is the heady rush of the cascading descent
soon to come the fullness of the end
soon to come the containment of the whole
then no more escape
then no more the falling falling sand
in the finishing only clarity
in the finishing only sight
This is a beautiful poem Sarah, full of the momentum of hope. Rarely is the on-rush of time spoken of so positively. The joy of responding to lines of Karol’s, is that one is enabled to catch his spirit and the Spirit that gave movement to his whole life, which sought always to probe the nature of man and his nature in time and eternity – his destiny in God.
ReplyDeleteYour incantational lines with their improvisational flourish gather pace towards that 'consummation greatly to be wished' that is a death full of Life, light and seeing. The repetition and the clarity work so well.
It seems to me that the more we arrive at vision the more simply we can express ourselves.
There are moments when our hope seems so much more real and well-founded than the present moment; when eschatalogically the True End becomes present. You have expressed it here. I think I was reaching towards it once in one small poem that your words remind me of. I think the poem was called All the Suffering..
All the suffering
All of it
Will come to an
End
The flowers bright with pink
And daisies white with joyful nnocence
Push up
Thrust forth
With excellent urgency
Towards the Spring
To Easter tide
And all their roots are
Gripped
with ecstasy
All the suffering
All of it
Will come to an
End
And not just
An ending
But a fulfilment
A purposeful encounter
With the Victory of pain’s offering
The Victory of love’s waiting
The Victory of self-giving
To the Glory of Joy
The Joy of Glory
All of it
Can you believe it
Will come at last to
See its own
Fulfilment
And its beauty
Radiant and dancing
At last.
5th February 2009
Happy Feast Day of the Patron Saint of Poetry St Brigid, whose feast falls on the First Day of the Celtic Spring in order to point us to the True Spring – Christ!
Thank you for all this important work Sarah that restores joy and hope to a study (academic views of poetry) that has tended to focus on the moribund rather than the glorious. Karol reminds us that we can touch this, but we pass through suffering and the will must work to persevere..
What important work in a world in which Euthanasia becomes more and more disasterously pushed as the compassionate and acceptable option. For the eyes that see with the clarity and vision of your poem have grown dim in the public sphere, and what is transparently evident in yours and Karol’s poems, have become merely invisible to the World.
Keep up the Seeing! We need it.
Thank you for taking the time to write this - it is very meaningful, and an important and difficult subject to approach, time passing, ageing, dying ... in a way that does justice to its depth, difficulty and seriousness. It seems to me that KW's poetry embodies deep, difficult and serious problems, and is very much like the Rhapsodic Theatre method, where it is the actor that embodies the problem. In both cases the presentation of the problem (and solution) comes through the pre-eminence of the spoken word, so meaning pre-dominants ... not technique, devices, cleverness etc, which is what a lot of modern poetry is all about; it is also how most people approach poetry - looking at it through the lens of its form, not content.
ReplyDeleteI think this must be why poetry in translation has more validity than sometimes it is given credit for - because words have equivalent meanings. Also, the modern approach to art has almost utterly lost the vital connection between the work of art and the artist, so cannot account for the intent (you could say faith) of the artist being transmitted in their work. If God is present in the life of the artist, then that transmission may also have another dimension.
"In today's literary culture an anti-genetic and 'eo ipso' anti-biographical current predominates. Generally ignorance or knowledge about the author neither disturbs nor helps," says DYBCIAK in his essay 'The Poetic Phenomenology of a Religious Man: About the Literary Creativity of Karol Wojtyła'.Now in KW's case you absolutely cannot get away from who he was, so there is no real category to understand this man as an artist, and perhaps that is why generally this aspect of his life is underplayed, under valued and not really understood. In my first workshop people were genuinely STUNNED and AMAZED that the poetry before them had been written by the pope.
We absolutely have to restore the connection between the artist and their work, in order to even begin to be able to talk about transcendence. Otherwise we will necessarily be impersonal Hegel-inspired historicists and not the personalists that we must be in order to demonstrate any kind of Christian truth in relation to art.
Well, I've gone off in rather a wide circle from the poem and your post, but those are the thoughts that have surfaced in me. I looked at again the KW poem extracts I put up under the TIME page. What I gather from his words is that the problem of death is so very real and stark, and you cannot get away from it, but there is another reality in which fear is transforms by love. And that this other reality can only be evoked by prayer.
Sliding into death I unveil the awaiting, my eyes
fixed on one place, one resurrection.
Yet I close the lid of my body, and the certainty
of its decay I entrust to the earth …
Allow the mystery to work in me,
teach me to act within my body
suffused with weakness like a herald prophesying death,
Like a cock crowing -
Allow the mystery to work in me, teach me to act in my soul
Which intercepts the body’s fear
.......
Hope rises in time
from all places subject to death –
hope is its counterweight …
I wander on the narrow pavement of this earth,
not turning aside from Your countenance
unrevealed to me by the world …
I wrestle with myself,
with so many others I wrestle
for my hope …
And so I am inscribed in You
by hope.
Outside You I cannot exist …
That wind stirred by Your hand now becomes Silence.
By the way, I loved your poem Sarah! You have a knack of putting words side by side that you would never think would go together - 'excellent urgency' and 'roots gripped with ecstasy'. I am going to put the link here to the times online article about your work because what you express there about the power of art to transform and awaken people existing with a culture of death is very, very well put:
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article6866510.ece
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