Album cover for Dave Mathew’s “Some Devil”

Baby

Baby it’s alright
Stop your crying
Now.

Nothing is here to stay.
Everything has to begin and end.
A ship in the bottle won’t sail.
All we can do is dream that a wind will blow us across the water.
A ship in the bottle set sail.

Baby it’s alright
stop your crying
Now.

There was a weakling man
who dreamed he was as strong as a hurricane
A ship in the bottle set sail
he took a breath and blew across the world.
He watched everything crumble.
He woke up a weakling again.

Some might tell you there is no hope in hand
Just because they feel hopeless
But you don’t have to be a thing like that.
You be a ship in a bottle set sail.

Baby it’s alright
Stop your crying, now
Its alright so stop your crying, now.
Be a ship in a bottle, set sail.

Dave Mathews from his album Some Devil, 2003

As I face my own death coming from confirmed stage four esophageal cancer these lines by Dave Mathews so speak to me. Understanding, as always, everything has to begin and end. But how to stay alive in that understanding?

And how striking Dave Mathew’s image of a person as a ship in a bottle! Stuck there. But then the idea of that ship somehow slipping loose and sailing on! A ship in the bottle set sail. How this encourages me in these days I have left to set sail big time. And, who knows, maybe there will sailing still to do when I leave the bottle of this earth time!

With death on my mind these days how impactful is a memory that comes back to me from a poetry writing session I was leading many years ago at The Cedars, a drug and alcohol recovery center. During that session a young man in recovery wrote a line in his poem on his addiction that slammed me: Death is THE fear.

What slammed me at the same time was the understanding of how easy it is to try and numb that fear of death by shutting down feelings and inducing a kind of living death, The substitution of one kind of death for another. Addiction as another kind of death.

Poets and song writers have lots to say about death and living deaths. Dave Mathew’s lines again:

Nothing is here to stay.
Everything has to begin and end.
A ship in the bottle won’t sail.
All we can do is dream that a wind will blow us across the water.
A ship in the bottle set sail.

And this remarkable and life affirming quote on death by a giant of 20th Century poetry, the German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke:

Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love. . . . Life always says Yes and No simultaneously. Death (I implore you to believe) is the true Yea-sayer. It stands before eternity and says only: Yes.

Letter to Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, Epiphany, 1923 by Rainer Maria Rilke from A Year With Rilke, Trans. Joanna Macy and Anita Burrows, HarperOne, 2009

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Welsh poet R.S. Thomas (1913-2000). Photo Credit: The Telegraph

The Bright Field

I have seen the sun break through
and illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but it is the eternity that awaits you.

R.S. Thomas from Collected Poems 1945-1990, Phoenix Press, 1995

Before I get to R.S. Thomas, I want to thank Richard for inviting me share something of my slow peregrination towards poetry. It probably began with William Blake, the Romantics and T.S. Eliot when I was young. But honestly, without Richard being on fire for poetry and bringing home new translations of Rilke and Rumi, books of Mary Oliver and Sharon Olds, Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier, booking us into the Skagit River Poetry Festival with our daughter Libby, I wonder if I would have reconnected with poetry with the passion that I did.

A possible starting place for my poetry actually happened during a pilgrimage. Richard and I were travelling through Ireland in 2002 with my favourite Irishman. The Reverend Canon Doctor Herbert O’Driscoll stood up in our bus as it wound up and down and around the narrow roads of Ireland and he read The Bright Field over the speaker system.

This poem reached deep down inside of me and touched something hidden, a truth, and I have hung on to it ever since. It spoke to me about the present moment. What is the choice you are making right now? Will you turn aside to the lit bush? Will you sell all you have to possess the one thing of true value? This poem changed everything and looking at it again I see something in it new and different. How can 14 lines, do so much? Combine a profound spiritual longing and commitment in the compact sonnet form? At the time, my life felt like one big hurrying on or hankering after.
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Canadian westcoast poet Susan Alexander

VANISHING GODS

Each year I wait for two maples at the shore
to gild themselves, scullery maids off to the ball.

We were in foreign parts, touring the qubbas,
the crumbled Alcázar. I was afraid I’d missed

the best mosaic, gold stars
scattered after last night’s wind.

We touch each other more often now, an extra
kiss before going for groceries. I can’t complain.

You were leaving this world when I found you.
You were always leaving.

Susan Alexander from The Southern Review, Fall 2023

RICHARD INTRODUCES GUEST POETRY BLOGGER # 29, SUSAN ALEXANDER, AND PART ONE OF HER TWO-PART SERIES

Life has its twists and turns. Joys and sorrows. The joy when Susan Alexander and I married in 1986. And our two children Tella and Libby. The sorrow when our marriage ended in 2008. The roads back to joy when we both remarried. The sorrow when Susan’s husband Ross, a true friend of mine before and after Susan and I ended, died earlier this year.

Now, a joy to celebrate Susan and her poetry career which began after we separated. To see her win poetry awards and publish two full length collections and a recently published chapbook which received an honorable mention in the 2024 Raven Chapbook Contest.

A joy to celebrate Susan but also the acknowledgement of the loss and sorrow of Ross’s recent death carried so forcefully in the epigraph poem that begins this post. It’s heart-ripping ending: You were always leaving. I wrote a tribute to Ross after he died. Please click here to read it.

Susan says in her introduction that she doesn’t know why she writes poetry, says that her introduction, her reflection, in these pages, might tell her. Her trust that like in writing poems this prose piece would tell her what she didn’t think she knew. And it did. It tells her poetry is where she finds out who she is beyond outward appearances. Also a way, she says: to work with suffering, to change it through artistic practice.

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Palestinian American poet, novelist and clinical pyschologist, Hala Alyan. Photo credit: from her website.

Spoiler

Can you diagnose fear? The red tree blooming from uterus
to throat. It’s one long nerve, the doctor says. There’s a reason
breathing helps, the muscles slackening like a dead marriage.
Mine are simple things. Food poisoning in Paris. Hospital lobbies.
My husband laughing in another room. (The door closed.)
For days, I cradle my breast and worry the cyst like a bead.
There’s nothing to pray away. The tree loves her cutter.
The nightmares have stopped, I tell the doctor. I know why.
They stopped because I baptized them. This is how my mother
and I speak of dying—the thing you turn away by letting in.
I’m tired of April. It’s killed our matriarchs and, in the back yard,
I’ve planted an olive sapling in the wrong soil. There is a droopiness
to the branches that reminds me of my friend, the one who calls
to ask what’s the point, or the patients who come to me, swarmed
with misery and astonishment, their hearts like newborns after
the first needle. What now, they all want to know. What now.
I imagine it like a beach. There is a magnificent sand castle
that has taken years to build. A row of pink seashells for gables,
rooms of pebble and driftwood. This is your life. Then comes the affair,
nagging bloodwork, a freeway pileup. The tide moves in.
The water eats your work like a drove of wild birds. There is debris.
A tatter of sea grass and blood from where you scratched your own arm
trying to fight the current. It might not happen for a long time,
but one day you run your fingers through the sand again, scoop a fistful out,
and pat it into a new floor. You can believe in anything, so why not believe
this will last? The seashell rafter like eyes in the gloaming.
I’m here to tell you the tide will never stop coming in.
I’m here to tell you whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful.

Hala Alyan from The Moon That Turns You Back, Ecco, 2024 and The New Yorker, Sept. 28th, 2020

Hala Alyan’s latest and fifth poetry collection, The Moon That Turns You Back,  speaks of resiliance and loss. Among others the loss of miscarriage, the loss of displacement. Daughter of Palestinian parents, born in the US but resident for many years of countries in the middle east she is a clinical pyscholgist, poet, newspaper commentator and novelist living in Brooklyn with her family.

I have been following Hala’s poetry and articles in The New York Times for some time. Her searing piece on fear and her thoughtful reflections on the reality of being Palestinian especially in the United States. And her poems. But her writing was brought into bright focus for me when my friend Rosemary sent me an email that included the last two lines of the poem above.

I’m here to tell you the tide will never stop coming in.
I’m here to tell you whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful.

So much in her poem Spoiler for all of us but also, now, for me. All the losses and setbacks in a life. The deaths. And these lines especially:

This is how my mother
and I speak of dying—the thing you turn away by letting in.

The reality of these lines as I face an esophageal cancer diagnosis that is likely incurable. I have been living with this for four or five weeks now. Still seems surreal. I speak of dying a lot these days but I am not resisting it. Not welcoming it. But accepting it. Whether I have months or years it has in such a strange way brought the reality of my living into sharp focus. The love I have received and given back as best I know.
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The 2007 poetry anthology, Poetry as Liturgy, edited by Canadian poet Margo Swiss

Easter Conversations

“they said unto them, why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here but is risen, remember how He spoke unto you when you were yet in Galilee.”
Luke 24.3-6 10-11

Jesus Christ knows flesh,
bodies speaking, always did
do what his Father said.

His mother’s hard labour, first,
in time, his own: walked his talk, then,
was crossed, tombed, shut up for good
dead (it was said)
until

He heard his Father say, rise,
be born again this day.

“it was Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James,
and the other women who were with them, which told these things unto
the apostles. And their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they
believeth them not.”

Margo Swiss from The Hatching of the Heart, Wipf & Stock, 2015

RICHARD INTRODUCES PART TWO OF THE GUEST POETRY BLOG SERIES #28 BY CANADIAN POET AND SCHOLAR MARGO SWISS

I am so pleased to have the poet and scholar Margo Swiss provide a detailed history in English poetry of poetry as liturgy and poet as priest. To know that, while so much poetry does not have an explicitly religious or spiritual basis, there is a history in Christianity of poetry as a specifically religious or spiritual practice.

POETRY AS LITURGY – POET AS PRIEST – A REFLECTION BY MARGO SWISS

In 2007 I edited an anthology, Poetry as Liturgy, presenting fourteen Canadian Christian poets from six denominations: Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, Presbyterian, United Church, and Mennonite. Each described their writing as a poetic liturgy to God and community. I align my own writing of poetry with this perspective, which I will try to explain in what follows.

The term liturgy derives from the Greek, leitourgia, a public work or duty offered to the community. It was in essence a religious act which satisfied the Greek practice of expenditure and sacrifice. The performance in Greek theatre was always preceded by a sacrificial offering to the gods upon an altar that was a permanent fixture of the stage. The tragic hero of drama was exemplary and suffered on behalf of the community. The dramatic process was cathartic for the audience, who vicariously participated in the hero’s fall and eventual catastrophe or death, following which a new order was established.
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The 2007 poetry anthology, Poetry as Liturgy, edited by Canadian poet Margo Swiss

Lover's Instructions

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark one come upon you,
           which shall be the darkness of God.
                                      T.S. Eliot, East Coker

Lights out-
now step into the dark;
lift up your eyes to whatever
you can not see.

As the blind go,
so you must move,
hands in reach of whatever
you can not know.

Here
even fear recedes
and words
fail.

Beyond in
in silence
Love stands ready
(eyes closed i anticipation)
to cover you
with such an embrace-

          In this place
          all receive
          and none waits.

Margo Swiss from Poetry and Spiritual Practice, Edited by Susan McCaslin, St. Thomas Poetry Series, 2001

RICHARD INTRODUCES GUEST POETRY BLOGGER # 28, MARGO SWISS, AND PART ONE OF HER TWO-PART SERIES

I first discovered the poems of Canadian Christian devotional poet Margo Swiss in 2002 when a dear friend gave me the book Poetry and Spiritual Practice, edited by well-known Canadian poet Susan McCaslin and published by the St. Thomas Poetry Series in 2001.

Then in 2007 I discovered another St Thomas publication, the poetry anthology, Poetry as Liturgy edited by Margo Swiss. (To read Margo’s definition of Christian liturgy from her anthology please see below.) After finding her anthology Margo and her poetry stuck with me. And as you will read in her post it was Margo and her husband David Kent who started the St. Thomas Poetry Series in 1996 which has included such well known Canadian authors as John Terpstra, David Waltner-Toews, Susan McCaslin, Richard Greene, George Whipple and Pier Giorgio di Cicco among many others in its list!
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A giant peony from our garden. In loving memory, on Mother’s Day, of my mother, Dorothy Elizabeth (Betty) Osler, an angel of flowers.

Today, this Mother’s Day

he will write a different poem. Peony soft
with big-enough curves to wrap around the moon
when it’s full. A poem with photons enough
to light up any night free of clouds and rain.

But it is easier to remember the place a mother might sit
looking over her garden. The one, that day
littered with tulips as if cut down in a hard wind
but worse, the hard wind anger is in a boy
with shears in his hand.

But in a place where
a mother might sit looking over her garden
could a boy, now a man, inside a poem,
bring one red tulip to place in her hand. And leave
forgiveness out of the story. Maybe it would be
enough – a man, once a boy and a mother – enough
that a tulip might be offered and a hand might be
open enough to receive it.

This, a difference
and, perhaps, enough.

Richard Osler, May 12th, 2024

Mother’s Day 2024. And I wanted to pull out some favorite “mother or grandmother” poems. Instead, first, I wrote my own poem for this Mother’s Day. An unexpected variation on a poem I have written countless times of the moment, in a blind rage, in my early teens, I cut all the heads off my mother’s prize tulips.

I trust that boy enough that he had due cause for that rage. Some way his mother did not understand or see him. Some way she accused him of something that was not true for him. But no matter the reason, the violence of that act haunts me still. A violence I still want to come to terms with. And out of this, a poem. Perhaps enough, or not.

And I don’t want my poem to have the last word. I don’t want to lose the chance to share other poems for mothers on this day made special for them. And I think, first, of the American poet Stephen Dunn’s unforgettable poem for his mother with its unforgettable lines: When Mother died/ I thought: now I’ll have a death poem.
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