Swan
by: Mary Oliver
Did you too see it, drifting, all night on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air,
an armful of white blossoms,
a perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings: a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
a shrill dark music, like the rain pelting the trees,
like a waterfall
knifing down the black ledge?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds--
a white cross streaming across the sky, its feet
like black leaves, its wings like the stretching light
of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?
This poem is all about being struck mute because of beauty. For Mary Oliver, it's a swan gliding in a river or lake, taking wing into morning light, its body a rising cross in the silvery sky. That's what stops Oliver in her tracks, makes her reflect on the meaning of beauty.
Holy Thursday today. The beginning of the Easter Triduum. For most of this weekend, I will be a Lutheran celebrating Easter. I will be playing tomorrow evening for my home parish--a Catholic celebration of Good Friday. Then two Easter Sunday morning Lutheran services.
I've always struggled during Holy Week, from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday. I think it's the retelling, again and again, of the narrative of Christ's Passion. I get swept up (or along) in the pathos of the whole story--the extreme humanity of the main actors. Judas. Peter. Mary. Pontius Pilate. Jesus. There's something quite beautiful (and heartbreaking) in all of the brokenness.
When you reach my age, you've experienced betrayal. You've probably betrayed someone, as well. And denied someone. Lost someone. Grieved for someone. It's all there. For me, this week is all about the beauty of being human. In the gospel narratives of the Passion, humankind at its very worst and very best is on full display.
My favorite moments in the gospels are when Jesus is at his most human. When he gets pissed or sad, feels bereft or frightened. That's the Jesus that interests me. Because I understand that Jesus. Yes, I get the whole Son of God part of Christ's DNA, but there's the whole Mary (Oliver) side that watched sunrises, picked flowers, admired swans, fell in love, wept for dead friends.
Maybe Jesus was a poet. I mean, he's a descendant of King David, author of the psalms. That means that poetry was in his blood. It also means that Jesus was stopped dead in his tracks every once in a while by the beauty of the world.
I think, in a lot of ways, seeing the universe through the eyes of a poet is sort of like having a divine point of view. I'm not saying poets are gods. I'm saying that poets recognize the importance of the small, insignificant, gorgeous things that stitch together this life. Now, what does a person do with that recognition?
I do what Mary Oliver did: I write poems. That's how I change my life, sentence by sentence, word by word.
When I got home tonight after church, I led a poetry workshop. It was a perfect way to end Maunday Thursday--with wonder and beauty.
Saint Marty wrote this:
I Came Home this Afternoon
by: Martin Achatz
after Diane Seuss
I came home this afternoon to an extra garbage
can blown into my yard by a spring wind
so strong it brought down pine branches,
dug up Taco Bell bags, rolled an empty can
of Miller Lite down the street as if it was
late for a party, the snow banks dwindled
into piles of striated sand, an archeology
of the entire winter of storms and melts,
blizzards and reprieves It is Holy
Thursday, when the church is stripped,
reds and purples paraded out by serious
parishioners intent on plucking the place
bare, until the world is just a knuckle, raw
and bleeding from hitting the wall too many times.
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