Hello friends. This is the Five Lines curated poetry letter, in which I share poetic stuff I’ve discovered and why it matters to me. Five Lines is, like everything else here at Tethered Letters, AI-free.
1. "all things you have ever seen here / Are like a garden looked at from a gate."
"Hope"
Czeslaw Milosz
Hope is with you when you believe
The earth is not a dream but living flesh,
That sight, touch, and hearing do not lie,
That all things you have ever seen here
Are like a garden looked at from a gate.
You cannot enter. But you're sure it's there.
Could we but look more clearly and wisely
We might discover somewhere in the garden
A strange new flower and an unnamed star.
Some people say we should not trust our eyes,
That there is nothing, just a seeming,
These are the ones who have no hope.
They think that the moment we turn away,
The world, behind our backs, ceases to exist,
As if snatched up by the hands of thieves.
I read this oft-quoted poem of Czeslaw's first in the context of a series of poems that were linked together, which started as descriptions of locations in and around a home (things like "The View from the Window," "Father in the Library," or "By the Peonies," etc.) and gradually became more abstract. This one was came after "Faith," as one might expect:
"Faith is in you whenever you look
At a dewdrop or a floating leaf
And know that they are because they have to be."
For Czeslaw, both of these poems (and the immediately following poem, "Love") are rooted in a physical world and not in abstractions, which is why I think they line up within the "placed" nature of the series. To have hope is to accept the physicality of the world as more than just a perception, but rather as a created reality, as something that points beyond itself. To have faith is to recognize that the physical reality we experience has a reason behind it. It's hard not to hear Hebrews 11:1-3 echoing from these lines:
“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the people of old received their commendation. By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.”
Skepticism is not the state humans were meant to inhabit; wonder is. The world conspires against our childlikeness from the moment we enter it. We lose our faith in things, in people, in God. Hope is hard to come by the more it is disappointed. But the poet says, look. Look at the birds of the sky, the flowers of the field. Look more clearly, more wisely. Don't let your skepticism steal your wonder at this world of ours. There is Someone here behind it all, and something good to come. If you rest here a minute, and open your eyes, you will see how small you are, and how big that Someone is.
"Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart..."
2. "a rook / Ordering its black feathers can so shine / As to seize my senses"
"Black Rook In Rainy Weather"
Sylvia Plath
On the stiff twig up there
Hunches a wet black rook
Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain --
I do not expect a miracle
Or an accident
To set the sight on fire
In my eye, nor seek
Any more in the desultory weather some design,
But let spotted leaves fall as they fall
Without ceremony, or portent.
Although, I admit, I desire,
Occasionally, some backtalk
From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain:
A certain minor light may still
Lean incandescent
Out of kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then —
Thus hallowing an interval
Otherwise inconsequent
By bestowing largesse, honor
One might say love. At any rate, I now walk
Wary (for it could happen
Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); sceptical
Yet politic, ignorant
Of whatever angel any choose to flare
Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant
A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality. With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content
Of sorts. Miracles occur.
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance
Miracles. The wait's begun again,
The long wait for the angel,
For that rare, random descent.
Sylvia's poetry always aches. She is always in a state of slim, almost non-existent expectation, which is why her work is so compelling. When everything is slipping from you — your loved ones, your sanity, your life — why do you go on? "I do not expect a miracle," she says, but then: "Miracles occur." Even if they are only tricks, even if they are rare, even if they are random. Sylvia is talking about hope here too, like Czeslaw. She may not be hopeful, as it were, but the flickers she finds are nonetheless sustaining for her in the dark, and a true engine for her poetry. In reality, I think her poetry eventually became an engine for her existence. It aches all the more because, despite the rooks, she did give up on looking for that light, and far too soon.
I think so much of my yearly yearning for the season of Advent is because it functions as a balancing agent to the holly-jolly of Christmas. It speaks the truth of our sadness and our longing for things to be made right, a truth that does not negate the truth of Christ making all things new, but somehow sweetens it further. We bear both of these truths at once, like Christ bore both Godhood and personhood in His body as a baby, in His body now ascended on high. He still bears the scars of His life here, as a testimony to a Greater Love that goes beyond glimpses, even if that's all we see of it sometimes.
We may be in that long wait now, but that doesn't mean that miracles won't occur, not when Jesus is Lord of heaven and earth. Who can say whether Sylvia did not ultimately open her eyes to a certain greater light, and find that all the minor lights she chased were just seen through a glass darkly?
3. "Nothing has dimmed / You have simply eclipsed all that stood in the way"
"beloved" from Broken Voice
My Epic
There are no nights now
When I don't dream and wake in the darkness
To find I've been weeping
But it has been ages
Since I've cried while awake
'Cause centuries wear on the heart
They erode it awayI'm still trying to record each word You spoke
And if I finish I'll fill up this earth
But the memory of Your voice leaves me empty
Cause I've been banished and boiled alive
And yet I remain
And they still call me by name
But they don't say it the same
I watched all of my brothers
Become martyrs and die one at a time
But I often wonder if waiting for You is the harder sacrifice
I may be feeble and barely alive
But I've yet to forget a single word that You said
If my voice breaks down
And all of the strength gives out
And I'm just a shell left breathing my last days out
(Let if be known) that time is a thief who surely steals everything
But in my case it just cleaned out the waste for me
Nothing has dimmed;
You have simply eclipsed all that stood in the way
I'd give 20 more lifetimes;
It would all be the same
In the end, I know I'll find You will come once again
You'll come call me by name
My Epic's Broken Voice album is the Advent soundtrack you didn't know you needed, just like Children of Men is the Advent movie you never asked for. Both of them speak peace in war, hope in despair, and light in darkness to me.
This song is from the perspective of John the Revelator, facing the listener with the question: what must it have been like to be the last of the disciples alive, waiting for your Lord to return? The lyrics are aggressively tired, but even in that exhaustion the singer clings to his Savior. Even in the silence he experiences, he holds to the Word he has been given, and finds in it something of a quiet resolve.
I wonder sometimes if these moments of desperation end up being revelations of the closeness of God that we would never encounter when gliding through our days like Snoopy over ice in A Charlie Brown Christmas (another wonderful Advent film). 400 years of silence, the darkness of a single night, the radical mercy of a God made flesh, come to dwell among us, to be sheltered and nurtured by us. What kind of love is this, that meets us in our lowest possible place, and somehow goes lower still?
4. "But at that moment..."
“The Window” from A Book of Luminous Things
by Raymond Carver
A storm blew in last night and knocked out
the electricity. When I looked
through the window, the trees were translucent.
Bent and covered with rime. A vast calm
lay over the countryside.
I knew better. But at that moment
I felt I'd never in my life made any
false promises, nor committed
so much as one indecent act. My thoughts
were virtuous. Later on that morning,
of course, electricity was restored.
The sun moved from behind the clouds,
melting the hoarfrost.
And things stood as they had before.
I discovered this poem in Czeslaw’s anthology of international poetry, A Book of Luminous Things. I love it because it sets the stage for an epiphany perfectly, and it does so through a truly mundane and relatable moment (at least for all of us who hail from colder climes). It's that peculiar kind of silence, when the morning comes after an epic ice storm and the entire world is white.
Raymond relates this storm, of all things, to an undeniable sense of absolution — as if it were a merciful act so wide and pure as to cover over all sins and to reveal the watcher as innocent without any deed of their own to justify it. Isn't that just like Christmas? Or maybe that's just like Easter. I get the two mixed up sometimes. Thank goodness when the morning after each of those holidays come, Jesus still pleads for us. In the aftermath of our Incarnate Storm, things never stand as they did before.
5. "Suspended at the apogee / of the golden dome..."
“Mosaic of the Nativity: Serbia, Winter, 1993”
Jane Kenyon
On the domed ceiling God
is thinking:
I made them my joy,
and everything else I created
I made to bless them.
But see what they do!
I know their hearts
and arguments:
"We're descended from
Cain. Evil is nothing new,
so what does it matter now
if we shell the infirmary,
and the well where the fearful
and rash alike must
come for water?"
God thinks Mary into being.
Suspended at the apogee
of the golden dome,
she curls in a brown pod,
and inside her the mind
of Christ, cloaked in blood,
lodges and begins to grow.
The anthropomorphism of having God thinking on the ceiling reveals something amazing: that God did think all of this up from before eternity, or rather that He was thinking it all the while, and that our limited, time-bound viewpoint of His entry into our world will always be like looking through a keyhole into glory.
Jane gifts us an absolutely gorgeous set of lines reminding us of Mary's own createdness, that she herself was born, and that Christ — His mind in many senses of the word — was placed, intentionally, into her. The words here speak of earthiness, of physicality, of viscera and pregnancy and labor: "curls," "brown pod," "cloaked in blood," "lodges." Jesus experienced the whole thing. There was a real human woman who carried God in flesh to term and gave birth to Him.
How could we not celebrate something so astounding? How can we not fall to our knees in adoration?
"I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant
A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality."
How Sylvia wedges her words into these tiny slits of grace is a miracle itself.
And a song from the perspective of John? That ache is real. Waiting does seem like the greater sacrifice.