Tuesday, March 22, 2011

new literature

I do hundreds of pages of reading a week generally (or at least, hundreds of pages are assigned) and am constantly discovering new authors two pour over and new books to reference. A poem by Andrew Hudgins from Bearing The Mystery about one of Botticelli's paintings caught my mind with the depth of emotion and history captured a few weeks ago. Because it must be shared, here is a segment of that and here are a few other bits and pieces from other poems as well.

Botticelli: The Lamentation over the Dead Christ

Dismiss the body bent so awkwardly
across his mother's lap: there's no god in it.
Dismiss the saint holding the nails, the thorns.
Remember only the Marys: Salome,
Cleophas, Magdalen -
and Mary, fainting virgin, her body
distended, bulging, because she suffers more
than anyone can grieve unless she loosen
her human shape and become impossible.

~~~~~~

How Beautiful the Beloved, Gregory Orr

The poem he's writing is a list
Of things he suddenly knows
Are precious.

He doesn't know
Where he's going - old man
At the start of a long, cold ride.
The list he recites is also long.

As long as he keeps making that list,
He's traveling towards the beloved.

~~~~~~~

This house, it's a thin place,
I think. The wind outside
might be the wind that summons
the faraway and brings, as near
as breath, the spirit of the dead
watching.

Who are you?
I ask the acres of emptiness
into which everything is gathered
and is -
turning the question
at last towards my own heart,
blind and stupefied - Who?

~~Margaret Gibson

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