American poet Denise Levertov
Suspended I had grasped God's garment in the void But my hand slipped On the rich silk of it. The 'everlasting arms' my sister loved to remember Must have upheld my leaden weight From falling, even so, For though I claw at empty air and feel Nothing, no embrace, I have not plummeted.
Denise Levertov (1923-1998) from The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov, New Directions, 2013
Catching my spiritual breath again today after leading a Poetry-as-Prayer retreat at St Georges Cadboro Bay in Victoria, Friday evening and all day Saturday. These retreats remind me how poetry can be so soul revealing. How, sharing poems creates sacred space. How differences melt away when our poems speak in the language of our essential humanity. Our language of loss and resilience.
Even though Poetry Month is behind us I am going to continue with my series of small poems. What a delight it has been find poems of ten lines-and-under and share them! It seems fitting today to feature a poem by Denise Levertov whose poetry is often featured in my poetry-as-Prayer retreats.
I experienced something of the truth of Levertov’s poem at my retreat. Poem after poem of loss and sorrows yet such expressions of gratitude and the strange paradox of losses that become catastrophic or fierce grace. That somehow become life-giving. That somehow in spite of a sense of God or the Beloved’s absence in our lives in moments of loss and challenge we manage to keep on. We do do not fall in a bottomless void. We are held up, somehow:
For though I claw at empty air and feel
Nothing, no embrace,
I have not plummeted.