Ancient Blessing, Ever Anew

Morning in a New Land by Mary Oliver came to me this morning through the World Community for Christian Meditation.  While she writes of Adam, we could easily insert the name Jesus, or Christ, or the names of those who have passed, or those just being born.  Yes, even our own. 

Today is Holy Saturday. Easter season is close at hand. Let us rise early and sing.      

  

In trees still dripping night some nameless birds
Woke, shook out their arrowy wings, and sang,
Slowly, like finches sifting through a dream.
The pink sun fell, like glass, into the fields.
Two chestnuts, and a dapple gray,
Their shoulders wet with light, their dark hair streaming,
Climbed the hill. The last mist fell away,

And under the trees, beyond time’s brittle drift,
I stood like Adam in his lonely garden
On that first morning, shaken out of sleep,
Rubbing his eyes, listening, parting the leaves,
Like tissue on some vast, incredible gift.

Lightly

I find this poem very humbling.  I think of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey. I think of Lao Tzu sitting on a water buffalo.  I think perhaps there are no words for this, so I light candles and remember a dream I recently had about my father who passed more than a decade ago.  In the dream he is very, very old.  He smiles and tells me, "I think I can let go of this house now."  He seems so happy.  I am glad.   

 The Moment

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round. 

Margaret Atwood