Seed

Seed
by Luci Shaw, from A Widening Light, ed. Luci Shaw, 1984.


God dug his seed
into dry dark earth.
After a pushing up
in hopeful birth
and healing bloom
and garland grace
he buried it again
in a darker place

Twice rudely-planted seed,
root, rise in me
and grow your green again,
your fruited tree

What Song, Then?

What Song, Then?

by Kathleen Norris, from Little Girls in Church, 1995

When my life is alien soil

and a wind

like fear

makes restless ground

of all I have done--

what song, then,

to send out roots

that will drink the rain

that does not come--

how could I sing?

Watch light come

from dark and mist rise

from waters

as sky and shore

emerge out of night,

and a tree half-green,

half-bare.

Half-afraid of what is in me

(though God has called it good)

I sob over nothing,

desires I cannot name.

Sing us, they say,

a song you remember...

The Sowing of Meanings

by Thomas Merton

See the high birds! Is theirs the song

That flies among the wood-light

Wounding the listener with such bright arrows?

Or do they play in wheeling silences

Defining in the perfect sky

The bounds of (here below) our solitude,

Where spring has generated lights of green

To glow in clouds upon the sombre branches?

Ponds full of sky and stillness

What heavy summer songs still sleep

Under the tawny rushes at your brim?

More than a season will be born here, nature,

In your world of gravid mirrors!

The quiet air awaits one note,

One light, one ray and it will be the angels' spring:

One flash, one glance upon the shiny pond, and then

Asperges me! sweet wilderness, and lo! we are redeemed!

For, like a grain of fire

Smouldering in the heart of every living essence

God plants His undivided power--

Buries His thoughts too vast for worlds

In seed and root and blade and flower.

Until, in the amazing light of April,

Surcharging the religious silence of the spring,

Creation finds the pressure of His everlasting secret

Too terrible to bear.

Then every way we look, lo! rocks and trees

Pastures and hills and streams and birds and firmament

And our own souls within us flash, and shower us with light,

While the wild countryside, unknown, unvisited of men,

Bears sheaves of clean, transforming fire.

And then, oh then the written image, schooled in sacrifice,

The deep united threeness printed in our being,

Shot by the brilliant syllable of such an institution, turns within,

And plants that light far down into the heart of darkness and oblivion,

Dives after, and discovers flame.

Seed

by Luci Shaw

God dug his seed

into dry dark earth.

After a pushing up

in hopeful birth

and healing bloom

and garland grace

he buried it again

in a darker place

Twice rudely-planted seed,

root, rise in me

and grow your green again,

your fruited tree

My hands still smell like soil

by Erin Tuttle

found here:  http://www.catapultmagazine.com/issues/alone/posts/my-hands-still-smell-like-soil

My hands still smell like soil

             only because today,

I planted Swiss chard

and beets

and others in the spinach family.

I scattered composites:

buttercrunch

bietina

romaine.

And I learned that longday onions

(family:  Amaryllis)

grow in cooler climates, so

if you want a Vidalia, better settle

for a Walla Walla.

Then there's Brassicaceae,

kohlrabi and kale and

Chinese cabbage.

But you wouldn't know

because you only helped me the first season,

          (back when I knew nothing)

when the landlord wouldn't let us dig, so

we gathered buckets and dresser drawers from the alleys,

filled them with soil and seeds.

The neighbor woman watched us from her window and wrote poems

because she wanted to fall in love

like us, with earth lines on her knuckles, and rain

warm and misty,

setting seeds to bed better than any fancy hose-head.

But what I had to learn (and this was harder

than remembering that tomatoes

are a member of the nightshade family, or

that a potato is a stem, or that a pumpkin handle

is called a peduncle)

            what I had to learn

was that healing hides in years

of filing the pea packets in the folder marked Fabeaceae,

and in February afternoons spent bent over 

trays of earth, breathing peat 'til I sneeze, 

feeling lonely and complete all at once.

A Better Resurrection

by Christina Rosetti

I have no wit, no words, no tears;

    My heart within me like a stone

Is numbed too much for hopes or fears;

    Look right, look left, I dwell alone;

I lift mine eyes, but dimmed with grief

    No everlasting hills I see;

My life is in the falling leaf:

    O Jesus, quicken me.

My life is like a faded leaf,

    My harvest dwindled to a husk;

Truly my life is void and brief

    And tedious in the barren dusk;

My life is like a frozen thing,

    No bud or greenness can I see:

Yet rise it shall--the sap of Spring;

    O Jesus, rise in me.

My life is like a broken bowl,

    A broken bowl that cannot hold

One drop of water for my soul

    Or cordial in the searching cold;

Cast in the fire the perished thing,

    Melt and remould it, till it be

A royal cup for Him my King:

    O Jesus, drink of me.