Good grief, I almost forgot to re-post the eponymous poem!

I received a volume of Rowan Williams poetry for Christmas, and have been distracted by that.  His “Flight Path” in that volume reminds me of some of the haunting ‘walking dead’ scenes from the Justin Kurzel film of Macbeth that we saw on Boxing Day.

Other Christmas books included Dave Walker’s newest collection, Heroes of the Coffee Rota (which is fabulous), Terry Eagleton’s Hope Without Optimism, James Martin’s Becoming Who You Are, and Steve Silberman’s Neurotribes.  In recent reads, I highly recommend Jenny Lawson’s Furiously Happy to those among us who preserve a sense of humor about anxiety disorders and don’t mind a certain amount of foul language.   A new-to-me poet is Jane Kenyon, whom I discovered via a The Religious Imagineer post. Re-posting here “Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks”:

I am the blossom pressed in a book,
found again after two hundred years…

I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper…

When the young girl who starves
sits down to a table
she will sit beside me…

I am food on the prisoner’s plate…

I am water rushing to the wellhead,
filling the pitcher until it spills…

I am the patient gardener
of the dry and weedy garden…

I am the stone step,
the latch, and the working hinge…

I am the heart, contracted by joy…
the longest hair, white
before the rest…

I am there in the basket of fruit
presented to the widow…

I am the musk rose opening
unattended, the fern on the boggy summit…

I am the one whose love
overcomes you, already with you
when you think to call my name…

— Jane Kenyon, “Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks”