from T.S. Eliot - East Coker (excerpts Section V)

"So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres -
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again : and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
........"

(c) excerpted from T.S. Eliot. East Coker (Section V)

(c) Photograph: John Robert Lee - "my vernacular city"


Eliot of Four Quartets; Walcott of Midsummer, The Bounty, The Prodigal; Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey - such masters and their later works are now my inspiration and my aspiration for my own poems of faith. Thank you.

canticle xxii : resurrection of the katts

The Apostle Paul writes in Romans 8:19, 21 : "For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God....because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God."

After the promised irruption of heaven into earth

and subsequent looting of the enemy's barrows,

imagine - the astounded hurtling of hawk, the disconcerted wonder of hen,

pup's amazement, astonished mule, kitten dumbfounded,

pipirit shocked! -

                                  And then, the heirs of God, cerement free,

parading the blue air. So great leviathan, cattle, creeping thing, each to its kind,

rise without burden, with the lords of the air,

to come to their City, and their names calling out, from the

Lamb's opening Book. 

(c) John Robert Lee from Canticles (2007)

(c) John Robert Lee - Photograph After the rain.

Canticle xv

Let us praise His Name with an opening lakonmet,
and in the graceful procession of weedova;
let laughing, madras-crowned girls rejoice before Him in the scottish
and flirtatious moolala, its violon hinting of heartache.
And while we forget time turning in quick-heeled polkas,
pause during the tentative norwegian -
for when the couples end the gwan won,
you alone must dance for Him your koutoumba.

(c) John Robert Lee from CANTICLES (2007)
(c) John Robert Lee - photograph, La Wenn Magrit.

Morne Gimie, Saint Lucia.

air

In the blue-dyed surfing of air

an inverted rainbowl

perches its prismatic lips

across the gracious, steadfast earth,

and in Veronica's garden

a cavorting butterfly prevaricates

among the vanes

of pigeon-peas' yellow blossoms,

and across town,

you yearn after those sexy dancers

barrelling through space,

arching, escalating over breath.

Contemplating Morne Gimie's triple mornes,

I envision Him

taken from our clouding sight,

upon the elevating air.

(c) John Robert Lee - from "elemental" in "elemental: new and selected poems" Peepal Tree, 2008.

(c) John Robert Lee - photograph, Morne Gimie, Wednesday October 21st.

Canticle liii

 

 "Because every fruit is a gift rising from the Eternal Seed

interred beyond the catacombs of exfoliating nebula,

encrypted in the woolen cerements folded like the ancient parchment of a deed

in the Hand of God, we sing this sedulous

faith. Handling such mysteries, probing parable and metaphor,

we arrived at this plain board (after the incredulous

hour) to find that urns of maize and grape had manifest

their witness into bread and wine. And fish."

(c) John Robert Lee from Canticles (2007)

(c) John Robert Lee, Photograph: Fish cakes.

Thomas Merton on the meaning of our existence

In the blurb to Thomas Merton's meditations The New Man (1961) the writer says that Merton "shows the conflict between man's exterior and interior identity, and points the way the soul must travel to find its spiritual reality in the transcendent yet constantly present Self of God". A Commonweal quote says that the writer "has acquired a profound understanding of the peculiarly contemporary questions which demand an authentic Christian answer." In the first chapter of these meditations, titled "The war within us", Merton writes on the meaning of existence. "Man, then, can only fully be said to be alive when he becomes plainly conscious of the real meaning of his own existence...to find life we must die to life as we know it. To find meaning we must die to meaning as we know it....To find the full meaning of our existence we must find not the meaning that we expect but the meaning that is revealed to us by God. The meaning that comes to us out of the transcendent darkness of His mystery and our own. We do not know God and we do not know ourselves. How then can we imagine that it is possible for us to chart our own course toward the discovery of the meaning of our life? ...Meaning is then not something we discover in ourselves, or in our lives. The meanings we are capable of discovering are never sufficient. The true meaning has to be revealed. It has to be "given." And the fact that it is given is, indeed, the greater part of its significance: for life itself is, in the end, only significant in so far as it is given.
As long as we experience life and existence as suns that have to rise every morning, we are in agony. We must learn that life is a light that rises when God summons it out of darkness. For this there are no fixed times."

(c) Photograph "Untitled" by John Robert Lee

Seamus Heaney on poetry readings

In Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney by Dennis O'Driscoll (Faber 2008), 1995 Nobel Laureate Heaney says the following about poetry readings: "In a good poetry reading - good for you, the poet, that is - you retrieve some of the quickening that you got when you first wrote the thing. The surprise and gratitude are with you again for a moment - the old sense of having been supplied with the words you needed to summon. You have an obligation as a poet not to betray the reality of that. You have been mysteriously recompensed by the words and you owe some fidelity to the mystery....So nowadays, every time I stand up I have been to the inside of what I hope to turn out, and feel both prepared and protected. Perhaps it's meditation by another name, but at this stage it's become a necessity. It means that each reading attains a sense of its own occasion. You may be speaking the same poems, but they are part of something intended, they aren't just inclusions in some accidental or incoherent bundle of things. It means you can give out and keep to yourself at the same time."  pgs 203, 204.

(c) Photograph Red Top by John Robert Lee.