Jonathan Chan – Page 3

February 9, 2021February 10, 2021

a patch of wild grace: In a Green Night

In a Green Night
Derek Walcott (1930-2017)

The orange tree, in varying light,
Proclaims her fable perfect now
That her last season’s summer height
Bends from each overburdened bough.

She has her winters and her spring,
Her moult of leaves, which, in their fall
Reveal, as with each living thing,
Zones truer than the tropical.

For if at night each orange sun
Burns with a comfortable creed,
By noon harsh fires have begun
To quail those splendours which they feed;

Or mixtures of the dew and dust
That early shone her orbs of brass
Mottle her splendor with the rust
She seemed all summer to surpass.

By such strange, cyclic chemistry
Which dooms and glories her at once
As green yet ageing orange tree
The mind enspheres all circumstance.

No Florida, loud with citron leaves,
Nor crystal falls to heal an age
Shall calm our natural fear which grieves
The loss of visionary rage.

Yet neither shall despairing blight
The nature ripening into art,
Nor the fierce noon or lampless night
Wither the comprehending heart.

The orange tree, in varying light
Proclaims her fable perfect now
That her last season’s summer height
Bends from each overburdened bough.

(1960)

***

Ecclesiastes 3:1-9 (NIV)

What do people gain from all their labors
    at which they toil under the sun?
Generations come and generations go,
    but the earth remains forever.
The sun rises and the sun sets,
    and hurries back to where it rises.
The wind blows to the south
    and turns to the north;
round and round it goes,
    ever returning on its course.
All streams flow into the sea,
    yet the sea is never full.
To the place the streams come from,
    there they return again.
All things are wearisome,
    more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing,
    nor the ear its fill of hearing.
What has been will be again,
    what has been done will be done again;
    there is nothing new under the sun.

***

***

Derek Walcott was a noted Anglophone poet from the Caribbean, a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, an essayist, and a teacher. Of mixed African, Dutch, and English heritage, Walcott’s writing practice was enlivened by the intertwining threads of his ancestry, as well as the immediacy of bringing a new culture out of the detritus of indigenous genocide in the Caribbean. In shaping the English language to the islands in which he was raised, Walcott sought to write ‘Verse crisp as sand, clear as sunlight / Cold as the curled wave, ordinary / As a tumbler of island water’, a style that suits its environs.

Raised as part of Saint Lucia’s Methodist minority against a ‘prejudiced, medieval, almost hounding kind of Catholicism’, Walcott saw poetry as a kind of priesthood to be pursued, anointed with a kind of divine import, a religious vocation dedicated to inscribing ‘a sense of gratitude both for what you feel is a gift and for the beauty of the earth’. Yet, in his poem ‘In a Green Night’, the kind of beauty that Walcott captures is engaged in a fraught tussle with the reality of decay.

The poem depicts an orange tree in the midst of deterioration and hardship. The tree, far from ‘last season’s summer height’, instead ‘Bends from each overburdened bough. There is a heaviness to Walcott’s description, one that echoes and resists the bounteous harvest of John Keats’ ‘To Autumn’ (1820). Walcott articulates this through ‘Her moult of leaves’ that reveal ‘Zones truer than the tropical’, addressing the shocks experienced by the tree under the harsh Caribbean climate.

This contradictory sense of an environment that nourishes and punishes is further shown through the ‘dew and dust’ that ‘[mottles]’ her ‘splendor with the rust’, dismantling the false hope of shining oranges, or ‘orbs of brass.’ Walcott describes this contradiction as ‘strange, cyclic chemistry / That dooms and glories her at once’, a set of redemptive, reconciliatory possibilities.

The cyclical nature of flourishing and suffering, ripening and pressure, described in Walcott’s poem invariably reminded me of the book of Ecclesiastes. There are echoes of toiling ‘under the sun’ in Walcott’s image of each ‘overburdened bough’, as are there echoes of the passage of day and night, season by season. The cynicism of the wise man in Ecclesiastes is expressed toward the banality and repetitiveness of earthly experience: ‘What has been will be again […] there is nothing new under the sun’. Such reminders are not necessarily just of the mundanity of that which we experience on earth, but perhaps the slight comfort in knowing that the constancy of the old hurts of earthly experience are mirrored in the constancy of God’s salvific, gracious character.

In moments where we may feel burdened, overwhelmed, or weary because of the things of the world, what draws us back into remembering the active, consistent presence of God?

***

February 9, 2021February 10, 2021

a patch of wild grace: Lack of Faith

Lack Of Faith
Anna Kamieńska (1920-1986)

Yes
even when I don’t believe
there is a place in me
inaccessible to unbelief
a patch of wild grace
a stubborn preserve
impenetrable
pain untouched sleeping in the body
music that builds its nest in silence

(2007)

***

Psalm 63:6-8 (NIV)

On my bed I remember you;
    I think of you through the watches of the night.
Because you are my help,
    I sing in the shadow of your wings.
I cling to you;
    your right hand upholds me.

***

***

Anna Kamieńska is a Polish poet. She lived through the Nazi occupation of Poland and the subsequent difficult years under Poland’s communist regime. Poet D. S. Martin writes that her poetry doesn’t describe the inhumanity of those times, but concentrates on essential, lasting things. Her husband — the poet Jan Śpiewak — died prematurely of cancer in 1967, and left Kamieńska in search of answers. In 1970 she wrote in her notebook, ‘I was looking for the dead, and I found God.’ During the 1970s, the Polish government tried to silence her and suppress her work because they saw her as part of the democratic movement. Even so, she has written twenty books of poetry and many biblical commentaries.

In her poem ‘Lack of Faith’, I was reminded of that sensation that comes with dancing at the razor edge of faith and doubt, one nurtured through the relentlessness of dialogue and questioning. Kamieńska’s poem is sparse, thoughtful, considered, and yet cognisant of what it is to yield to the persistence of that secret place where we are known most intimately by God. Her use of avian imagery draws to mind the process by which faith is nurtured in the shadows of God’s wings. This is the image featured in Psalm 63: the psalmist remembers God while in bed, seeking help, singing praises, upheld by the right hand of God.

How do we experience the dance between faith and doubt? What would it look like for us to return to the ‘patch of wild grace’?

***

February 9, 2021February 10, 2021

a patch of wild grace: Language

Language
Camille T. Dungy (b. 1972)

Silence is one part of speech, the war cry
of wind down a mountain pass another.
A stranger’s voice echoing through lonely
valleys, a lover’s voice rising so close
it’s your own tongue: these are keys to cipher,
the way the high hawk’s key unlocks the throat
of the sky and the coyote’s yip knows
it shut, the way that aspens’ bells conform
to the breeze while the rapid’s drum defines
resistance. Sage speaks with one voice, pinyon
with another. Rock, wind her hand, water
her brush, spells and then scatters her demands.
Some notes tear and pebble our paths. Some notes
gather: the bank we map our lives around

(2006)

***

Lamentations 3:28-33 (NIV)

Let him sit alone in silence,
    for the Lord has laid it on him.
Let him bury his face in the dust—
    there may yet be hope.
Let him offer his cheek to one who would strike him,
    and let him be filled with disgrace.

For no one is cast off
    by the Lord forever.
Though he brings grief, he will show compassion,
    so great is his unfailing love.
For he does not willingly bring affliction
    or grief to anyone.

***

***

‘Language’, is by Camille T. Dungy, an African American poet and professor of English at Colorado State University. She has done marvellous work in her seminal anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009), which sought to provide alternative ways of perceiving and engaging with nature through the lenses of African American poets and writers. In doing so, part of her project was to broaden the bounds of her readership’s understanding of nature, shifted away from the sometimes cloying romanticism so often featured in the Anglo-American canon of poetry.

Her poem ‘Language’ is one of the poems featured in her anthology. Her first clause is evocative: ‘Silence is one part of speech’, ascribing the absence of sound a significance in how we may understand articulation and soundscapes. She draws our attention then to that which we may think of as ambient noise – ‘the war cry / of wind down a mountain pass’, a ‘stranger’s voice echoing through lonely / valleys’, ‘the high hawk’s key’, and ‘the coyote’s yip’. These bursts of noise are hermeneutic – ‘keys to cipher’ – understanding that our silence enlivens the possibilities of listening to that which cascades naturally across an area of land. The sonic rhythms of that which is inanimate, the ‘Sage’ and ‘the breeze’, the ‘rapid’ and the ‘pinyon’, take on an animacy because of their capacity to produce sounds. They are anthropomorphised artistically as the ‘Rock’ becomes a painter, the ‘wind her hand, water / her brush’. The poem ends anaphorically, ‘Some notes gather: the bank we map our lives around’.

There is perhaps something to be said about how silence gathers the possibility of remembering how God is revealed in His creation, as is the subject of Psalm 66: ‘All the earth bows down to you; they sing praise to you, they sing the praises of your name’. Yet, for Dungy, ambience yields a different kind of reorientation, an auditory cartography in which every created thing has its own rhythm, pace, and place. Just as these sounds threaten to tear down, they also help to restore order.

In this respect, this notion of silence reminded me of Lamentations. In chapter 3, the writer implores of the mourner, ‘Let him sit alone in silence, for the LORD has laid it on him. Let him bury his face in the dust– there may yet be hope.’ Silence brings the ability to reorient ourselves, to be faced with the recognition of a kind of terror that our inner lives are patterned with sin, and to listen to how our yearning for the presence of God becomes amplified. Out of silence breathes hope, for ‘no one is cast off / by the Lord forever’. In a similar fashion, silence brings Dungy’s speaker back to the possibilities of order, a reminder of the coordinates by which a life can be structured, a recollection not only of a place in a broader scheme of things but also of what it is to learn to speak once again.

What is the place of silence in your life? Where do you often find yourself silent, and in the cradle of God’s hand, where does that silence bring you to?

***

February 9, 2021February 10, 2021

a patch of wild grace: Ice Storm

Ice Storm
Robert Hayden (1913-1980)

Unable to sleep, or pray, I stand
by the window looking out
at moonstruck trees a December storm
has bowed with ice.
Maple and mountain ash bend
under its glassy weight,
their cracked branches falling upon
the frozen snow.
The trees themselves, as in winters past,
will survive their burdening,
broken thrive. And am I less to You,
my God, than they?

(1966)

***

Job 38:22-30 (NIV)

Have you entered the storehouses of the snow
    or seen the storehouses of the hail,
which I reserve for times of trouble,
    for days of war and battle?
What is the way to the place where the lightning is dispersed,
    or the place where the east winds are scattered over the earth?
Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain,
    and a path for the thunderstorm,
to water a land where no one lives,
    an uninhabited desert,
to satisfy a desolate wasteland
    and make it sprout with grass?
Does the rain have a father?
    Who fathers the drops of dew?
From whose womb comes the ice?
    Who gives birth to the frost from the heavens
when the waters become hard as stone,
    when the surface of the deep is frozen?

***

***

Robert Hayden was an American poet, essayist, and educator who served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1976 to 1978, a role known today as Poet Laureate of the United States. He was the first African-American writer to hold the office. Hayden’s idea of poetry has always been of it as an artistic frame rather than a polemical demonstration, addressing qualities shared by mankind such as social justice. And yet, this extended to how he perceived himself, preferring to identify as an American rather than Black poet, inciting controversy for supposedly abandoning his racial heritage to conform to the standards of a white literary establishment. Nevertheless, Hayden is known for the exactness of his language in his craft, as well as his command of poetic structures and techniques. This is evident in his poem ‘Ice Storm’.

The poem’s language is sparse and precise, evocative and simple. It begins, ‘Unable to sleep, or pray, I stand / by the window looking out’. That which he sees forms the visual anchor of the poem: the word ‘moonstruck’ vividly draws to mind the tree bathed in moonlight, ‘bowed with ice’ yields an image of a tree bent by the pressures of winter. The ‘Maple and mountain ash bend /under its glassy weight’ until ‘cracked branches’ fall. This vision of unrelenting turmoil, that which bends a resilient organism to the point of breaking, made me think of the climactic conclusion of Job where God reveals himself.

In response to the bitterness of Job’s protestations, God declares in chapter 38, ‘Have you entered the storehouses of snow / or seen the storehouses of the hail / which I reserve for times of trouble’? God is the originator of all that is fearsome and moving about the extremity of winter, He who ‘gives birth to the frost from the heavens’. This grand sweep of creation that God presents, extending beyond the bitterness of cold to deserts, wasteland, and grass, is meant to humble Job and remind him of God’s divine sovereignty.

And in Hayden’s poem, confronted by the relentlessness of the storm, he too is reminded of a kind of divinity. Hayden subscribed to the Baha’i faith, so I do not want to conflate his conception of God with ours, but the final line nevertheless bears some resonance for us. Seeing the trees that will ‘survive their burdening’, the speaker asks, ‘am I less to You / my God, than they?’ The trees are symbols of persistence and renewal, and though they bend and they break, they survive. Hayden’s poetic vision reminds of similar ends to suffering, of bearing the presence of God in the midst of difficulty, while also remembering that we are not any less than the rest of what God has created. Confronted with the tremendous force of nature, the speaker is reminded of a kind of divine faithfulness and provision, one that is not too distant from Job’s reminder of divine sovereignty.

What reminds you of God’s power? What reminds you that He cares for you?

***

February 9, 2021February 10, 2021

a patch of wild grace: Thank You

Thank You
Ross Gay (b. 1974)

If you find yourself half naked
and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing,
again, the earth’s great, sonorous moan that says
you are the air of the now and gone, that says
all you love will turn to dust,
and will meet you there, do not
raise your fist. Do not raise
your small voice against it. And do not
take cover. Instead, curl your toes
into the grass, watch the cloud
ascending from your lips. Walk
through the garden’s dormant splendor.
Say only, thank you.
Thank you.

(2006)

***

1 Thessalonians 5:14-18 (NIV)

And we urge you, brothers and sisters, warn those who are idle and disruptive, encourage the disheartened, help the weak, be patient with everyone. Make sure that nobody pays back wrong for wrong, but always strive to do what is good for each other and for everyone else.

Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.

***

***

Ross Gay is a poet and academic who teaches creative writing and literature at Indiana University and Drew University. His recent collection of essays, The Book of Delights (2019), brought me a great deal of joy in the months just after lockdown in Singapore, with each piece functioning as a journal-type entry cataloguing a moment of delight or elation that Gay felt in a specific day. This undercurrent of joyfulness runs throughout his work, such as in his award-winning poetry collection Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015), a humming commitment to the question of how, as he describes, ‘we attend to the ways that we make each other possible.’

‘Thank You’, taken from his first collection Against Which (2006), is a stunning example of this. In place of anger, frustration, violence, or vindictiveness, it insists on attentiveness, awe, and gratitude. It is atmospheric and evocative, particularly as a poem written in the conditional and the second person, addressing a ‘you’ that is ‘half naked / and barefoot in the frosty grass’, reminded of the ephemerality of being ‘the air of the now and gone’ and the voice of the earth that ‘says all that you love will turn to dust’. This recognition of our transitory existence is one to be met not with the raising of ‘your fist’ or your ‘small voice’, nor with the act of taking ‘cover’.

The turn in the poem is seamless, syllogistic. The speaker continues with a litany of quick, sensory delights, brief moments of great pleasure: the tactility of curling ‘your toes into the grass’, the visibility of evaporated breath as a ‘cloud / ascending from your lips’, and the deliberateness of walking through ‘the garden’s dormant splendor’. Gay’s poem is one that sees despair and brings it to rest, quiet before the calm of gratitude. It reminds me of the scriptural injunction of 1 Thessalonians to ‘give thanks in all circumstances’, a corollary of doing ‘what is good for each other and for everyone else.’ Most reassuringly, this is done because ‘this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.’

What brings us back to a place of gratitude?

***

February 9, 2021February 10, 2021

a patch of wild grace: The Bright Field

The Bright Field
R. S. Thomas (1913-2000)

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

(1975)

***

Exodus 3:1-10 (NIV)

Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. So Moses thought, “I will go over and see this strange sight—why the bush does not burn up.”

When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, “Moses! Moses!”

And Moses said, “Here I am.”

“Do not come any closer,” God said. “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” Then he said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” At this, Moses hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God.

The Lord said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey—the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.”

***

***

R. S. Thomas, a preeminent poet of the 20^th-century, served as an Anglican priest in Wales. Thomas’ works have been a source of great solace to me if anything because his work displays an uncompromising willingness to articulate what it feels to be abandoned by God, or as a friend has described it, the sensation of God having just left a room you’ve entered. Thomas’s poem ‘Sea-Watching’ articulates this well: ‘There were days, / so beautiful the emptiness / it might have filled, / its absence was its presence’.

More than any other poet I know, Thomas grapples with the question of doubt that arises from this perception of absence, a similar sense of anguished yearning expressed by St. John of the Cross in his writing on the Dark Night of the Soul. It is of particular comfort given that Thomas is a priest, deeply ensconced in the work of making piety comprehensible to his parish every Sabbath, and yet that he wrestles as candidly as he does with God in his observations of prayer, landscape, and his flock. Compounding Thomas’s sense of anguish is the puncturing of any romanticism he may have carried with him to his rural congregation in Wales, the realisation that there is nothing inherently praiseworthy about desolation or inherently wise about shepherds, as was detailed in his poem ‘Welsh Landscape’. Thomas also experienced a linguistic estrangement from his Welsh identity, having only learned to speak it late in life. One detects these disgruntlements expressed in his poetry time and again.

In the light of this, his poem ‘The Bright Field’ holds a kind of epiphanic power, a moment where the presence of God is so unequivocal that it breaks through to the weary believer. The speaker begins with the forgetting of beauty, the sun breaking through ‘to illuminate a small field / for a while’, and the eventual realisation that it is ‘the / pearl of great price’, that which ‘I must give all that I have / to possess it.’ The metaphorical language Thomas employs is biblical, the glimpse of beauty a reflection of one’s salvation in Christ. It is the remembrance of this effulgent beauty that drives the speaker to articulate that ‘Life is not hurrying / on to a receding future, nor hankering after / an imagined past’, the thousand little anxieties that consign us to worrying about the passage of time.

It is at the poem’s apex that Thomas invokes Moses, ‘turning aside’ to ‘the miracle of the lit bush’. It is the climactic, irreversible, unassailable declaration of presence that Moses encounters in Exodus, the ‘flames of fire from within a bush’ where God calls him to deliver his people from slavery. This ‘strange sight’ is one that sanctifies all that is around it, as God commands Moses to remove his sandals at holy ground, ready to be anointed for the task of bringing the Israelites to a ‘land flowing with milk and honey’. Moses’ appointment as deliverer places him in the continuum of servants who came before him – Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And so it is with Thomas that the presence and instruction of God make themselves so clear, so unavoidable, that he cannot help but embrace ‘a brightness / that seemed as transitory as your youth’, one that itself embodies ‘the eternity that awaits you’.

Thomas’s poem is one to be read slowly. Just as Thomas’ speaker is suddenly made aware of the presence of God, what may be done out of our present yearnings and strivings to seek His face? And how can the memory of such encounters with God grant us strength and comfort when He suddenly feels silent, absent, or far away?

***