Ten Poems for Lent 2024
Lately, it seems there are too many words no matter where I look. Maybe you feel the same way. We’re told we need to slow down and reflect during seasons like Advent and Lent, but these times get filled quickly with explanations, expositions, and exegesis. As we move into the second week of Lent, here are ten poems you can read slowly, ones that I love and offer to you as a companion— poems of grief, introspection, waiting and fragile hope. May they stir you to slow, look, imagine, repent, and believe.
Prayer
Every day I want to speak with you. And every day
something more important
calls for my attention—the drugstore, the beauty
products, the luggage
I need to buy it for the trip.
Even now I can hardly sit here
among the falling piles of paper and clothing, the
garbage trucks outside
already screeching and banging.
The mystics say you are as close as my own
breath.
Why do I flee from you?
My days and nights pour through me like
complaints
and become a story I forgot to tell.
Help me. Even as I write these words I am planning
to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence.
-Marie Howe
Process (How Long, O Lord)
Everyone, take out your pencils
You’ll have two minutes to show me
how many facts can trace
from your brain to your fingertips
fumble with tiny pegs and find
the yellow edges before they pop
back out again
and again you can’t fall asleep in your bed
honor your father
shake the sense
of dread, some patients find it takes
six to eight weeks before seeing a full effect
or nine or 12 or 16
We had hoped, by now, just, should
not see some sign the knot is untangling?
If it’s possible, may this cup be taken
from me, but not as I will but will you
help me be patient?
My throat burns from swallowing
and there’s still so much ocean.
-Melissa Weaver
Light chaff and falling leaves or a pair of feathers
on the ground can spook a horse who won’t flinch when faced
with a backhoe or a pack of Harleys. I call it “horse
ophthalmology,” because it is a different kind of system—
not celestial, necessarily, but vision in which the small,
the wispy, the lightly lifted or stirring threads of existence
excite more fear than louder and larger bodies do. It’s Matthew
who said that the light of the body is the eye, and that if
the eye is healthy the whole body will be full of light. Maybe
in this case “light” can also mean “lightness.” With my eyes of
corrupted and corruptible flesh I’m afraid I see mostly darkness
by which I mean heaviness. How great is that darkness? Not
as great as the inner weightlessness of horses whose eyes perceive,
correctly I believe, the threat of annihilation in every windblown
dust mote of malignant life. All these years I’ve been watching
out warily in obvious places (in bars, in wars, in night cities and
nightmares, on furious seas). Yet what’s been trying to destroy
me has lain hidden inside friendly-seeming breezes, behind
soft music, beneath the carpet of small things one can barely see.
The eye is also a lamp, says Matthew, a giver of light, bestower
of incandescent honey, which I will pour more cautiously
over the courses I travel from now on. What’s that whisper?
Just the delicate sweeping away of somebody’s life.
-Gail Wronsky
Staying Power”by Jeanne Murray Walker
In appreciation of Maxim Gorky at the International Convention of Atheists, 1929
Like Gorky, I sometimes follow my doubts
outside to the yard and question the sky,
longing to have the fight settled, thinking
I can't go on like this, and finally I say
all right, it is improbable, all right, there
is no God. And then as if I'm focusing
a magnifying glass on dry leaves, God blazes up.
It's the attention, maybe, to what isn't there
that makes the emptiness flare like a forest fire
until I have to spend the afternoon dragging
the hose to put the smoldering thing out.
Even on an ordinary day when a friend calls,
tells me they've found melanoma,
complains that the hospital is cold, I say God.
God, I say as my heart turns inside out.
Pick up any language by the scruff of its neck,
wipe its face, set it down on the lawn,
and I bet it will toddle right into the godfire
again, which—though they say it doesn't
exist—can send you straight to the burn unit.
Oh, we have only so many words to think with.
Say God's not fire, say anything, say God's
a phone, maybe. You know you didn't order a phone,
but there it is. It rings. You don't know who it could be.
You don't want to talk, so you pull out
the plug. It rings. You smash it with a hammer
till it bleeds springs and coils and clobbery
metal bits. It rings again. You pick it up
and a voice you love whispers hello.
Unblend, Unburden
Unblend, Unburden
Hello, you with the wild
eyes and the shaking arms
and the guns you don’t
actually know how to use.
I thought you were sleepless
nights and tight throat but
I see now how hungry you were.
Vigilante who decided the
authorities weren’t adequate,
your cardboard badge had
fooled a few, but you started to
fold. Oh, you—valiant,
tired. We’re here now, the One
not sanctioned by the law-keepers
but who could hold the whip well
and me.
We will climb inside the place
she hides. You can step aside. Truly.
Your guns can become bottle
bottomed candles, white and solemn.
You can join in the river asking for
justice to roll down, remember,
His spear is not too short
to save.
-Melissa Weaver
Taking Care
I sit with my grief. I mother it. I hold its small, hot hand.
I don’t say, shhh. I don’t say, it is okay. I wait until it is done
having feelings. Then we stand and we go wash the dishes.
We crack open bedroom doors, step over the creaks, and
kiss the children. We are sore from this grief, like we’ve
returned from a run, like we are training for a marathon.
I’m with you all the way, says my grief, whispering, and then
we splash our face with water and stretch, one big shadow
and one small.
-Callista Buchen
Possible Answers to Prayer
Your petitions—though they continue to bear
just the one signature—have been duly recorded.
Your anxieties—despite their constant,
relatively narrow scope and inadvertent
entertainment value—nonetheless serve
to bring your person vividly to mind.
Your repentance—all but obscured beneath
a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more
conspicuous resentment—is sufficient.
Your intermittent concern for the sick,
the suffering, the needy poor is sometimes
recognizable to me, if not to them.
Your angers, your zeal, your lip smackingly
righteous indignation toward the many
whose habits and sympathies offend you—
these must burn away before you’ll apprehend
how near I am, with what fervor I adore
precisely these, the several who rouse your passions.
-Scott Cairns
Same
I still haven’t figured out how to keep
my shower floor clean or make morning
smoothies or respond to stress calmly.
Same, same, same my friends tell me,
a love note of sorts. Maybe the world
doesn’t need us to cut down on carbs or
make more money or waste less time.
Maybe instead it needs us to reach those
who feel alone in their messy homes or
difficult relationships or unresolved
issues. To impress less and connect
more. To share one simple message:
Same. Same, same, same.
-Hannah Rosenberg
Let Us Busy Ourselves
Let us busy ourselves
with the business of heaven
on this tangled earth, even if
it’s slow, even if it requires
guesswork and trustwork
and hearts so full of one
another that we can barely
stand upright.
-Lori Hetteen
Growing Apples
There is big excitement in C block today.
On the window sill,
in a plastic ice cream cup
a little plant is growing.
This is all the men want to talk about:
how an apple seed germinated
in a crack of damp concrete;
how they tore open tea bags
to collect the leaves, leached them
in water, then laid the sprout onto the bed
made of Lipton. How this finger of spring
dug one delicate root down
into the dark fannings and now
two small sleeves of green
are pushing out from the emerging tip.
The men are tipsy with this miracle.
Each morning, one by one,
they go to the window and check
the progress of the struggling plant.
All through the day they return
to stand over the seedling
and whisper.
-Nancy Miller Gomez
