Category Archives: verse

Verse – The Bird in the Tree by Ruth Pitter

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Scroll all the way down to the link View the Original Post to read and hear Ruth Pitter’s poem The Bird in the Tree.

malcolmguite's avatarMalcolm Guite

https://lanciaesmith.com/image-for-the-day-advent/ https://lanciaesmith.com/image-for-the-day-advent/

For January 2nd in my  Anthology from Canterbury Press, Waiting on the Word, I have chosen to read The Bird in the Tree by Ruth Pitter. On New Year’s Eve we considered Hardy’s almost reluctant glimpse of transfiguration ‘when Frost was spectre-grey, and ‘shrunken hard and dry’, and Hardy’s heart, bleak as the world through which he moves, nevertheless hears for a moment the ‘ecstatic sound’ of his darkling thrush. And even though he wanted to end his poem with the word ‘unaware’, something of the transcended has ‘trembled through’ his poem. Today’s poem, also about hearing a bird in a tree, also addresses the question of how the transcendent might for ‘a moment of time’ ‘tremble through’ into the immanent.

You can hear me read this poem by clicking on the title or the play button. the image above was created by Lancia Smith, and carries a quotation…

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Verse – A Short Walk in the Dark

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I hear the purr from spouse
As I feel the urge to pee
The quilt I push aside
And pivot socks to floor

The Persian carpet edge
I feel and know is worn
As I pad unsteadily
Around the bed

My right hand holds
The maple top
Of bureau that long ago
Lost the marble slabs

I wobble but reach out
For the chrome handle
Of the closet door
And inch to reach

The bathroom door
Always open to the bars
That help the elderly
Stay upright until

The seat is reached
No more do I stand
To urinate but
Lower pull-ups

Ahh release
Pull old body up again
Repeat my steps
Return to bed

  • Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, Jan. 1, 2016

Verse – The Last Septet

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INTRO: Steve just posted on his CaringBridge site: “Awoke clear-headed, with more energy than in weeks. Just wrote this poem”:

I do not know how to die.
No words left to say good-bye.

The cancer spread everywhere;
Family and friends showed they care.

Will I find a peaceful death?
Or fight for each gasping breath?

Be here now? To future bow…

  • Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, Dec. 29, 2015

NOTE:

Biggest and smallest Dogs

Biggest and smallest Dogs

My friend and Views from the Edge colleague, Steve, was diagnosed mid-November with terminal pancreatic cancer. For years death and dying have been a topic of conversation among the seminary friends who keep changing our group’s name. At first we called ourselves The Chicago Seven. After Dale died, we were six. We became The Gathering. More lately we call ourselves The Dogs. Steve at 6’8 is the biggest Dog. He’s always said “Big dogs go first.”

A month ago Steve came to Minnesota for a consultation at the Mayo Clinic. On a Thursday, Kay and I visited Steve and Nadja in their small room at the Kaylor Hotel across the street from the Clinic. While Nadja and Kay began to discuss the procedures Steve would undergo the next day, Steve stuck his fingers in his ears and smiled at me. I’m with Steve, I’d rather just do it when it’s time. I’d rather not know. I wonder if it’s a guy thing.

Steve wrote “The Last Septet” after his second Chemo treatment back in Illinois, a treatment meant to give him more time with no illusions about the outcome. To live forthrightly without illusion is a beautiful thing. Meanwhile, the other five Dogs watch and pray, growl and snarl, curse the cancer, mourn his demise, remember our shared mortality and the line from the Presbyterian Church (USA) A Brief Statement of Faith: “In life and death we belong to God.”

Gordon, a much smaller Dog, December 29, 2015.

 

 

 

Verse – The Exchange

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INTRO: This piece uses the Hebrew terms for man (atham) and woman (athama), descriptions that remind Hebrew readers that human beings are of the dust, of the earth.

The Exchange 

“Did God really say you will die if you
eat the fruit of the tree in the middle
of the garden, the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil?” asked the snake
of the woman beside the Elysian tree.

So she did eat and so did he – Atham
and Athama, the earthlings – wishing to
be like God, mocking death by dividing
evil from the good down below where
a snake exchanged a hiss for a kiss.

“Cursed are you among all animals,”
said God. “On your belly you shall go,
eating dust along your way. Atham
and Athama will bruise your head,
and you shall bruise their heel.”

Then the two-legged creatures knowing
good and evil, dividing the Garden between
sheep and goats, stumbled at a nip on
the heel and heard a hiss: “You, too,
are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Of the forbidden fruit of that one tree all
earthlings still do eat despite the voice
from the tree that tamed the snake,
exchanging a kiss for the hiss: “Forgive
them, for they know not what they do.”

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, Dec. 28, 2015

Verse – Christmas: a Donkey’s Tale

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Hee Haw

Burro's ears

Burro’s ears

“Just put the burro here,” he said,
“She’ll calm the horses of the folks
inside the inn.”  And so they tied
me to the pole above the trough.

I was surprised he later led
a man and girl into the stall
and pointing to the straw, he said,
“Sleep here,  this simple space is all
that’s left tonight, and if the child
is born the cries won’t wake the guests.”

He grimaced, but she somehow smiled
and sank down to the ground.  Their rests
did not last long.  Her labor soon
began and then the baby, wrapped
and warm, was laid under the moon
light bright where we, the stock, were trapped
and fed.  I brayed when shepherds dumb
barged in and said a king had come…

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, Dec. 11, 2012

Verse – Christmas Re-Imagined

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INTRO: How strangely idyllic Jesus’s birth appears in Matthew. No mention of the absence of a midwife, stench, or unsanitary conditions. The animals were the only neighbors, including the goats and sheep of Matthew’s parable of the Last Judgment, and as I have re-imagined it, the serpent who would bruise humanity’s heel in Genesis 3:8-15.

All the midwives were busy that night
when goats and sheep butted and
bleated for a taste of the after-birth
while a hapless not-quiet-husband
knelt beside his not-yet-wife Mary,
confused by having to birth this
child of another he’d never met,
a lamb she said was meant to be
for reasons he could not feel or see.

No Star Wars star shone above
a forgotten place the three of them
shared with none but bulls and
cows, hens and roosters, a snake
slithering through the straw toward
the donkey’s heel, the goats on
his right, the sheep on his left,
before the angels said the baby’d
come to bruise the serpent’s head.

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, Dec. 27, 2015

Verse – December Rain and Reign

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Trinity Episcopal Church ExcelsiorSome Sundays, like last Sunday, I just don’t feel like going to church. The weather was depressing. I was feeling kind of down. But we went, Kay and I.

After going to church, I wrote this piece. A poet I am not. Steve’s the poet of Views from the Edge. But, hey, he’s a very forgiving guy. Hope you are, too.

Advent Rain – Christmas Reign

harvest-being-2014-051In drizzling rain under
sullen gray-chilled skies
we trudge to church as
through a Scottish moor –
neither fall nor winter,
a gloomy in between
when spring’s bright
hope seems dead as
days are dark and short –
on the way toward
a reign in Bethlehem.

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, Dec, 15, 2015

Verse on the first Christmas

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“No Christians Were There”

No Christians were there at the birth
of Jesus. (For “…disciples were
first called Christians in Antioch”
years later.) But were those who were
there believers? the shepherds, the wise
astrologers, the non-father,
the Blessed mother? Did they see
with eyes of faith, or more like we
do: wonder, ponder, doubt and stare
at the small baby stabled there…?

That three were Jews, we know for sure.
The genealogies we read
in Matthew, Luke, go back as far
as Abraham. Eight days, we read,
then circumcision for the babe.
The Arab wise guys may be from
the land we call Iran. The sheep
herders may have been aliens
in the land illegally: cheap
pay for smelly foreigners.

The barn contained no royalty–
the stock had better pedigree…
and yet some say a King was born
to poor folks that the rich would scorn…

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, Dec. 21, 2013

Birthday Tribute to Steve

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Kate Shoemaker, MD, and her Uncle Steve Shoemaker share the same birthday – today, December 19. Kate sent this to Steve today. Kate, from St. Louis, MO, is spending the day with Steve and Nadja in Urbana, IL.

Happy Birthday poem from Kate Shoemaker to Uncle Steve.

Happy Birthday poem from Kate Shoemaker to Uncle Steve.

Verse – Who is worshiped at Wheaton College?

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The Atlantic published “Professor Suspended for Saying Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God” yesterday.  Tenured political science Associate Professor Larycia Hawkins [Click HERE for Wheaton College’s faculty profile] was suspended by the Wheaton Administration for saying Christians and Muslims worship the same God.

Steve Shoemaker, Wheaton College, Class of 1965, and co-publisher of  Views from the Edge’s wrote this response this morning:

Who Is Worshiped at Wheaton College?

We worship the God of Abraham. (Jews)

We worship the G_D of Abraham (but consider his name so Holy, we do not say it or write it.) (Orthodox Jews)

We worship the God of Abraham. (Christians)

We worship Jesus, our Savior, and the Holy Spirit, our Comforter, along with God the Creator, a Trinity, who we believe was The God of Abraham.

We worship the God of Abraham. (Muslims)

We worship Allah, whose prophet was Mohammad, the same God as the Christians, whose prophets were John the Baptist, and Mary, and Joseph and Jesus; and the same God as the Jews, whose prophets were Moses and Aaron and Miriam, and Jonah, and David.

Steven Robert Shoemaker, BA, Psychology, Wheaton College, 1965.