The Lord has the best verses...
Psalm 130
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord!
O Lord, hear my voice!
Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy!
If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities,
O Lord, who could stand?
But with you there is forgiveness,
that you may be feared.
I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
and in his word I hope;
my soul waits for the Lord
more than watchmen for the morning,
more than watchmen for the morning.
O Israel, hope in the Lord!
For with the Lord there is steadfast love,
and with him is plentiful redemption.
And he will redeem Israel from all his iniquities.
-------
Psalm 131
O Lord, my heart is not lifted up;
My eyes are not raised too high,
I do not occupy myself with things
too great and too marvellous for me.
But I have calmed and quietened my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother,
like a weaned child is my soul within me.
O Israel, hope in the Lord
from this time forth and for evermore.
Saturday, 11 July 2009
Some verses that make me wonder...
First of the Last Chances
I stand back as the Skipton train advances,
having to choose too fast
between the scorn and sympathetic glances
of my supporting cast
all of whom think boarding this train enhances
my odds. I wave it past
If I don't take the first of the last chances
I will not fear the last
By Sophie Hannah
----------
Early in the Morning
While the long grain is softening
in the water, gurgling
over a low stove flame, before
the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced
for breakfast, before the birds,
my mother glides an ivory comb
through her hair, heavy
and black as calligrapher's ink.
She sits at the foot of the bed.
My father watches, listens for
the music of comb
against hair.
My mother combs,
pulls her hair back
tight, rolls it
around two fingers, pins it
in a bun to the back of her head.
For half a hundred years she has done this.
My father likes to see it like this.
He says it is kempt.
But I know
it is because of the way
my mother's hair falls
when he pulls the pins out.
Easily, like the curtains
when they untie them in the evening.
By Li-Young Lee
------
Chasing shadows
My love was made of glass;
But I am blackened coal:
Stained and hardened by time,
Opaque against her translucence
She found my shadow,
Staring, shivering.
The sun sought her out;
She gently refracted and gave me light;
Slowly she took my darkness, and I her light;
Now I hold her in my bloodied hands:
Shattered pieces that bring life,
Jagged edges that leave me scarred.
I bleed still, from old wounds she bound;
Tiptoe on bridges over salt tear seas of fears
Is it enough to love ‘we’
When it’s too much to love me?
By J R Keane
--------
Tie your heart at night to mine, love
Tie your heart at night to mine, love,
and both will defeat the darkness
like twin drums beating in the forest
against the heavy wall of wet leaves.
Night crossing: black coal of dream
that cuts the thread of earthly orbs
with the punctuality of a headlong train
that pulls cold stone and shadow endlessly.
Love, because of it, tie me to a purer movement,
to the grip on life that beats in your breast,
with the wings of a submerged swan,
So that our dream might reply
to the sky’s questioning stars
with one key, one door closed to shadow.
By Pablo Neruda
I stand back as the Skipton train advances,
having to choose too fast
between the scorn and sympathetic glances
of my supporting cast
all of whom think boarding this train enhances
my odds. I wave it past
If I don't take the first of the last chances
I will not fear the last
By Sophie Hannah
----------
Early in the Morning
While the long grain is softening
in the water, gurgling
over a low stove flame, before
the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced
for breakfast, before the birds,
my mother glides an ivory comb
through her hair, heavy
and black as calligrapher's ink.
She sits at the foot of the bed.
My father watches, listens for
the music of comb
against hair.
My mother combs,
pulls her hair back
tight, rolls it
around two fingers, pins it
in a bun to the back of her head.
For half a hundred years she has done this.
My father likes to see it like this.
He says it is kempt.
But I know
it is because of the way
my mother's hair falls
when he pulls the pins out.
Easily, like the curtains
when they untie them in the evening.
By Li-Young Lee
------
Chasing shadows
My love was made of glass;
But I am blackened coal:
Stained and hardened by time,
Opaque against her translucence
She found my shadow,
Staring, shivering.
The sun sought her out;
She gently refracted and gave me light;
Slowly she took my darkness, and I her light;
Now I hold her in my bloodied hands:
Shattered pieces that bring life,
Jagged edges that leave me scarred.
I bleed still, from old wounds she bound;
Tiptoe on bridges over salt tear seas of fears
Is it enough to love ‘we’
When it’s too much to love me?
By J R Keane
--------
Tie your heart at night to mine, love
Tie your heart at night to mine, love,
and both will defeat the darkness
like twin drums beating in the forest
against the heavy wall of wet leaves.
Night crossing: black coal of dream
that cuts the thread of earthly orbs
with the punctuality of a headlong train
that pulls cold stone and shadow endlessly.
Love, because of it, tie me to a purer movement,
to the grip on life that beats in your breast,
with the wings of a submerged swan,
So that our dream might reply
to the sky’s questioning stars
with one key, one door closed to shadow.
By Pablo Neruda
Monday, 4 May 2009
Two sonnets by Pablo Neruda...
Not only a beautiful romantic poem, but it also reminds me of when we first discover God's love and realise how it makes all things new...
Sonnet XXV
Before I loved you, love, nothing was my own:
I wavered through the streets, among
Objects:
Nothing mattered or had a name:
The world was made of air, which waited.
I knew rooms full of ashes,
Tunnels where the moon lived,
Rough warehouses that growled 'get lost',
Questions that insisted in the sand.
Everything was empty, dead, mute,
Fallen abandoned, and decayed:
Inconceivably alien, it all
Belonged to someone else - to no one:
Till your beauty and your poverty
Filled the autumn plentiful with gifts.
--------
I love the "interruption" here, which seems to make it so much more tender and personal...
Sonnet VIII
If your eyes were not the color of the moon,
of a day full [here, interrupted by the baby waking -- continued about 26
hours later ]
of a day full of clay, and work, and fire,
if even held-in you did not move in agile grace like the air,
if you were not an amber week,
not the yellow moment
when autumn climbs up through the vines;
if you were not that bread the fragrant moon
kneads, sprinkling its flour across the sky,
oh, my dearest, I could not love you so!
But when I hold you I hold everything that is --
sand, time, the tree of the rain,
everything is alive so that I can be alive:
without moving I can see it all:
in your life I see everything that lives.
Not only a beautiful romantic poem, but it also reminds me of when we first discover God's love and realise how it makes all things new...
Sonnet XXV
Before I loved you, love, nothing was my own:
I wavered through the streets, among
Objects:
Nothing mattered or had a name:
The world was made of air, which waited.
I knew rooms full of ashes,
Tunnels where the moon lived,
Rough warehouses that growled 'get lost',
Questions that insisted in the sand.
Everything was empty, dead, mute,
Fallen abandoned, and decayed:
Inconceivably alien, it all
Belonged to someone else - to no one:
Till your beauty and your poverty
Filled the autumn plentiful with gifts.
--------
I love the "interruption" here, which seems to make it so much more tender and personal...
Sonnet VIII
If your eyes were not the color of the moon,
of a day full [here, interrupted by the baby waking -- continued about 26
hours later ]
of a day full of clay, and work, and fire,
if even held-in you did not move in agile grace like the air,
if you were not an amber week,
not the yellow moment
when autumn climbs up through the vines;
if you were not that bread the fragrant moon
kneads, sprinkling its flour across the sky,
oh, my dearest, I could not love you so!
But when I hold you I hold everything that is --
sand, time, the tree of the rain,
everything is alive so that I can be alive:
without moving I can see it all:
in your life I see everything that lives.
Monday, 9 March 2009
Something and Nothing
If you had known how little
you would have had to give
to drum into this brittle
hope the desire to live
would you have changed the venue,
your greeting or your tone
or planned things better when you
knew we’d have hours alone
and if you heard a hollow
voice spit these ill-advised
questions, would nothing follow?
I wouldn’t be surprised.
-- Sophie Hannah
If you had known how little
you would have had to give
to drum into this brittle
hope the desire to live
would you have changed the venue,
your greeting or your tone
or planned things better when you
knew we’d have hours alone
and if you heard a hollow
voice spit these ill-advised
questions, would nothing follow?
I wouldn’t be surprised.
-- Sophie Hannah
And sometimes the glass is overflowing with blue skies and sunshine....
Sometimes
Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail.
Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.
A people sometimes will step back from war,
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.
Sometimes our best intentions do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.
-- Sheenagh Pugh
Sometimes
Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail.
Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.
A people sometimes will step back from war,
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.
Sometimes our best intentions do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.
-- Sheenagh Pugh
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)