CAN POETRY MATTER?:

-ESSAY: Ears to Hear, Eyes to See: Luci Shaw's poetry helps us pay attention to God's world. (John G. Stackhouse Jr., 12/26/02, Christianity Today)

Luci Shaw's poetry examines trees, love, fog, marriage, streams, sex, parenthood, fish, cooking, airing out a cottage, birds, gardening, age, clouds, and death. Indeed, her poetry appeals so widely because she writes about each of us and the world we enjoy, not about the lofty, peculiar realm of "The Poet."

Too much poetry nowadays is merely murky, so self-referential that readers grope and stumble as they try to get their bearings and somehow enjoy it. Shaw's poetry is much more complex than it initially looks, but it welcomes almost anyone who will take the time to sit and read—and especially, as with all poetry, read aloud. Try this one:

Flathead Lake, Montana
"Christ plays in ten thousand places."
-Gerard Manley Hopkins

Lying here on the short grass, I am
a bowl for sunlight.

Silence. A bee. The lip lip of water
over stones. The swish and slap, hollow

under the dock. Down-shore
a man sawing wood.

Christ in the sunshine laughing
through the green translucent wings
of maple seeds. A bird
resting its song on two notes.

We have trouble reading biblical poetry—psalms, prophecies, parables. In our commendable concern to clarify, we often "murder to dissect," as Wordsworth put it. "There!" we say. "Now that we've decoded all this poetic mumbo-jumbo, we can plainly see what this means." We fail to let the words work their divine magic in their intended arrangement, to let them resound within us and evoke perhaps more than one meaning, and more than one response. Reading poetry can help us return to the Scriptures as more patient readers, more attentive to the music of the text, more open to the side doors, back doors, windows, skylights, and trap doors of the Word as well as to the front door of straightforward exposition.

And we preachers and theologians in particular could learn from poets the virtues of being concise, precise, and incisive. Too often we are, in our teaching as much as in our prayers, like the Gentiles who "heap up empty phrases," hoping that we will "be heard for our many words" (Matt. 6:7). Many of us, as the saying goes, don't take the time necessary to prepare a shorter sermon—or a clearer or sharper one. Instead, we ought to pray and preach with both the lavishness of attention and the economy of expression of poets. Less, and better, is more.

So who needs poetry? I do. You do. That's why God gave us so much of it in the Bible. That's why God gave us so much of it throughout history. And that's why, among other good reasons, God gave us Luci Shaw.

Here's one of Ms Shaw's poems suitable to the season:

Mary's song

Blue homespun and the bend of my breast
keep warm this small hot naked star
fallen to my arms. (Rest ...
you who have had so far
to come.) Now nearness satisfies
the body of God sweetly. Quiet he lies
whose vigor hurled
a universe. He sleeps
whose eyelids have not closed before.
His breath (so slight it seems
no breath at all) once ruffled the dark deeps
to sprout a world.
Charmed by dove's voices, the whisper of straw,
he dreams,
hearing no music from his other spheres.
Breath, mouth, ears, eyes
he is curtailed
who overflowed all skies,
all years.
Older than eternity, now he
is new. Now native to earth as I am, nailed
to my poor planet, caught that I might be free,
blind in my womb to know my darkness ended,
brought to this birth
for me to be new-born,
and for him to see me mended
I must see him torn.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 27, 2002 2:17 PM