Poetry Sunday
The unique power of poetry to convey intimate emotional experience has long been applied to Christian sacred practice. From the Psalmist to the present day, poetry is an invaluable component of our worship tradition. At Trinity we are blessed to number poets among our parishioners, and we celebrate their work and our great cultural inheritance of sacred poetry with a Poetry Sunday each spring, in which poems join our usual offerings of music and recitations of Biblical excerpts in our Sunday services. The practice was inaugurated in 2014 by the Rev. Luk De Volder in the hopes of celebrating “the poetry of life and the poetry of faith.”
Poetry Sunday Read-In 2020
Past Selections
Praying
Mary Oliver
“It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.”
An Act of Faith
Barbara Jordan
In the water I see stars, among the reeds
the mountain of my face,
and across a distance two geese
in the twilight of a lake, like stilettos.
So many touchstones. I lean toward life,
I unbuckle the flowers’ roots,
hold birds
and know the privilege, know the trees
as vessels of shadow.
And if the sky is gray and anguished gray above a field
before a storm—
and the leaves shake, shake, shake
with a spiritual palsy—
I look over my shoulder unsure: am I observed,
or do I observe?
Let show all things splended,
in their darker nature
splendid also. Lord you know the mask
of my face, how I peer at the world
from under a leaf, from under the squint
of my intelligence
I can’t comprehend or find contradiction
in evidence of past milleniums, the broken
ancient skulls,
galaxies behind the sun. Certainly all creatures
pause, and gaze benignly
into the air, into the light where birds fly and are gone:
this is the Light I lean toward.
Antiphon
George Herbert (1593-1633)
Let all the world in ev’ry corner sing
‘My God and King.’
The heav’ns are not too high,
His praise may thither fly:
The earth is not too low,
His praises there may grow.
Let all the world in ev’ry corner sing,
‘My God and King.’
The church with psalms must shout
No door can keep them out:
But above all, the heart
Must bear the longest part.
Let all the world in ev’ry corner sing,
‘My God and King.’
No Man Is an Island
John Donne
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
Stone Cross
Sheila Bonenberger
I will never go to Finland,
never see their dark forests fed
by icy streams, never
see reindeer in the wild,
never feel their mossy antlers.
I’ll never sip ice water
from a Russian river, never
tell fairy tales in Icelandic,
that many layered language,
never say “How are you?”
to a bearded Finnish farmer,
or wake up in a Finnish bed
made of ancient northern trees,
covered in a puffy eiderdown quilt,
my nose cold in the chilly dawn
wind blowing air in off the tundra
through the cracks
in a handmade wooden house
like the one where the young woman
(who pulls a sled filled with old clothes
to sell at a flea market) lives.
She’ll take the money
and buy tea to warm her hands
first thing in the morning
before she treks to work in a quarry
fashioning stone crosses
like the one I hold now and rub with my thumb
until the stone shines from without
as much as it shines
from within.