Marilyn Nelson*

Marilyn Nelson is an American poet, translator, children’s book author, professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut, and the former Poet Laureate of Connecticut. She has won several awards, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Denise Levertov Award, and the Frost Medal.

Mark Doty has said, “Nelson’s bold and sure poems long for heaven and—happily for us—continue a lifelong affair with the occasions of earth.”

In an interview with Jeanne Murray Walker she said, “I’m not particularly interested in writing about my life. I’m one of the lucky ones, with too happy a life for poetry.” This has led her to researching and writing about the lives of such people as Emmett Till, George Washington Carver, Venture Smith, and some lesser-known people.

The following poem is from For The Body (Louisiana State University Press, 1978).

Churchgoing

The Lutherans sit stolidly in rows;
only their children feel the holy ghost
that makes them jerk and bobble and almost
destroys the pious atmosphere for those
whose reverence bows their backs as if in work.
The congregation sits, or stands to sing,
or chants the dusty creeds automaton.
Their voices drone like engines, on and on,
and they remain untouched by everything;
confession, praise, or likewise, giving thanks.
The organ that they saved years to afford
repeats the Sunday rhythms song by song,
slow lips recite the credo, smother yawns,
and ask forgiveness for being so bored.

I, too, am wavering on the edge of sleep,
and ask myself again why I have come
to probe the ruins of this dying cult.
I come bearing the cancer of my doubt
as superstitious suffering women come
to touch the magic hem of a saint's robe.

Yet this has served two centuries of men
as more than superstitious cant; they died
believing simply. Women, satisfied
that this was truth, were racked and burned with them
for empty words we moderns merely chant.

We sing a spiritual as the last song,
and we are moved by a peculiar grace
that settles a new aura on the place.
This simple melody, though sung all wrong,
captures exactly what I think is faith.
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
That slaves should suffer in his agony!
That Christian, slave-owning hypocrisy
nevertheless was by these slaves ignored
as they pitied the poor body of Christ!
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble,
that they believe most, who so much have lost.
To be a Christian one must bear a cross.
I think belief is given to the simple
as recompense for what they do not know.

I sit alone, tormented in my heart
by fighting angels, one group black, one white.
The victory is uncertain, but tonight
I'll lie awake again, and try to start
finding the black way back to what we've lost.

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about Marilyn Nelson: first post, second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Denise Levertov*

Denise Levertov (1923—1997) is an American poet, who was born in Britain. She received many awards, including the Robert Frost Medal, and the Conference on Christianity & Literature Lifetime Achievement Award in Poetry. Most of her 24 poetry collections were published through New Directions. She taught at several universities including Brandeis, MIT, Tufts, and Stanford. In 1989 she moved to Seattle, and taught part time at University of Washington.

Although her father was an Anglican priest, she was an agnostic up until her conversion to Christianity in 1984 ― which she described as a gradual move from regretful scepticism to Christian belief. In a 1990 essay she referred to the work of the artist, as work that "enfaiths," and said the imagination is “the chief of human faculties," and it must be "by the exercise of that faculty that one moves toward faith, and possibly by its failure that one rejects it as delusion."

The following poem is from The Stream & the Sapphire (1997), a collection of her poems on religious themes.

What the Fig Tree Said

Literal minds! Embarrassed humans! His friends
were blurting for Him
in secret: wouldn’t admit they were shocked.
They thought Him
petulant to curse me!—yet how could the Lord
be unfair?—so they looked away,
then and now.
But I, I knew that
helplessly barren though I was,
my day had come. I served
Christ the Poet,
who spoke in images: I was at hand,
a metaphor for their failure to bring forth
what is within them (as figs
were not within me). They who had walked
in His sunlight presence,
they could have ripened,
could have perceived His thirst and hunger,
His innocent appetite;
they could have offered
human fruits—compassion, comprehension—
without being asked,
without being told of need.
My absent fruit
stood for their barren hearts. He cursed
not me, not them, but
(ears that hear not, eyes that see not)
their dullness, that withholds
gifts unimagined.

*This is the fourth Kingdom Poets post about Denise Levertov: first post, second post, third post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection is Ampersand (2018, Cascade). His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock, including the anthologies The Turning Aside, and Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse.

Jay Parini

Jay Parini has authored dozens of books. His New and Collected Poems 1975—2015 appeared from Beacon Press in 2016. His novels often look into historic characters, such as The Passages of H.M. (about Herman Melville), and The Last Station (about Leo Tolstoy); the latter was adapted into an Academy Award nominated film. He has written many literary biographies, such as of John Steinbeck and Robert Frost. His book Jesus: The Human Face of God (2013) invites readers into his personal quest for knowing Jesus. He has also written non-fiction books such as Why Poetry Matters (2008).

Parini has been on the faculty of Middlebury College in Vermont since 1982. The film version of his novel Benjamin’s Crossing which he and his wife, Devon Jersild, adapted into a screenplay, is to be released in 2018.

His Morning Meditations

My father in this lonely room of prayer
Listens at the window
In the little house of his own dreams.

He has come a long way just to listen,
Over seas and sorrow, through the narrow gate
Of his deliverance.

And he dwells here now,
Beyond the valley and the shadow, too,
In silence mustered day by dawn.

It has come to this sweet isolation
In the eye of God, the earliest of mornings
In the chambered skull, this frost of thought.

This post was suggested by my friend Burl Horniachek. Posted with permission of the poet.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection is Ampersand (2018, Cascade). His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock including the anthologies The Turning Aside, and Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse.

John Poch

John Poch is the author of four poetry collections, the newest of which, Fix Quiet (2015, St. Augustine’s Press), won the 2014 New Criterion Poetry Prize.

My first connection with his poetry was through the CD collection Poetry on Record which brings together recordings of 98 different poets reading their own work — including such early voices as Tennyson, Whitman, Yeats and Frost — and contemporary poets such as Li-Young Lee and Carolyn Forché. Poch’s recording, from 2004, has him reading his poem “Simon Peter” which originally appeared in the magazine, America.

He is the founding editor of the journal 32 Poems, and teaches at Texas Tech University. The following poem first appeared in Blackbird.

John's Christ

The auctioneer commits his little gaffe
when his helpers lift the latch-hook tapestry
of Leonardo’s Christian masterpiece:
The Large Supper. The waiting bidders laugh.

And though the latest spiritual fad has raptured
a populace of novel novel-lovers,
DaVinci’s purpose is better left to others.
But here at our local auction I am captured,

wanting to lean, like John, away from the master,
get some perspective on His hands, the gist
of one opening, one closing, not a fist,
His arms apart, beholding, Jesus’ gesture—

over his empty plate and the rag-tag cast—
preparing for the word, large, or last.

Posted with permission of the poet.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.

Marilyn Nelson*

Marilyn Nelson is the author of more than twenty books, including such poetry collections as Magnificat (1994) and Faster Than Light: New and Selected Poems (2012). Her newest poetry collection is The Meeting House (2016, Antrim House). It is the history of the First Congregational Church of Old Lyme, Connecticut — but is more than that, for it does not shy away from concerns of slavery and racism within this historic Christian community.

She has written books for young adults, and for young children, and has translated poetry, including the nonsense rhymes of Danish poet Halfdan Rasmussen. In 2012 she won the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Medal. She is the Poet-in-Residence of the Poets Corner at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, and served as Poet Laureate of Connecticut from 2001—2006.

She is one of the poets featured in my new anthology The Turning Aside: The Kingdom Poets Book of Contemporary Christian Poetry, which came out in November — (available here) and through Amazon.

The following poem is from Carver: A Life in Poems (2001)

Watkins Laundry and Apothecary

Mariah Watkins, Neosho, Missouri

Imagine a child at your door,
offering to do your wash,
clean your house, cook,
to weed your kitchen garden
or paint you a bunch of flowers
in exchange for a meal.
A spindly ten-year-old, alone
and a stranger in town, here to go
to our school for colored children.
His high peep brought tears:
sleeping in a barn and all that,
nary mama nor kin,
but only white folks
he left with their blessing,
his earthly belongings
in a handkerchief tied to a stick.

I've brought a houseful of children
into this world, concentrating on
that needle's eye into eternity.
But ain't none of them children mine.
Well, of course I moved him on in.
He helped me with my washings,
brought me roots from the woods
that bleached them white folks' sheets
brighter than sunshine. He could fill
a canning jar with leaves and petals
so when you lifted the lid
a fine perfume flooded your senses.
White bodices and pantalettes danced
around George on my line.

He was sweet with the neighbor children.
Taught the girls to crochet.
Showed the boys
a seed he said held a worm
cupped hands warmed so it wriggled and set
the seed to twitching.
Gave them skills and wonders.
Knelt with me at bedtime.

He was the child the good Lord gave
and took away before I got more
than the twinkle of a glimpse
at the man he was going to be.
It happened one Saturday afternoon.
George was holding a black-eyed Susan,
talking about how the seed
this flower grew from
carried a message from a flower
that bloomed a million years ago,
and how this flower
would send the message on
to a flower that was going to bloom
in a million more years.
Praise Jesus, I'll never forget it.

He left to find a teach that knew
more than he knew.
I give him my Bible.
I keep his letters
in the bureau, tied with a bow.
He always sends a dried flower.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Marilyn Nelson: first post, third post.

Posted with permission of the poet.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.

Wilmer Mills

Wilmer Mills (1969—2011) is an American poet and painter, influenced by the formal techniques of such poets as Robert Frost and Richard Wilbur. He grew up, first in Brazil—as the son of Presbyterian missionaries—and later in his home state of Louisiana. For several years, he and his young family lived in a bungalow in Sewanee, Tennessee which he had built himself. His poems have appeared in many journals, and in the Penguin Anthology of Contemporary Younger Poets. He died at age 41, less than three months after being diagnosed with liver cancer.

He only had one full-length book of poems published in his lifetime, Light for the Orphans (2002). Fortunately, the University of Evansville Press has just published his Selected Poems, which also includes newer poems and some from his earlier chapbook, Right as Rain (1999).

The following poem first appeared in First Things.

Near Starbucks

A homeless woman sleeps outside the door.
She smells of urine so the customers
Who eat brioche and talk about the poor
Step wide of her in winter and in summer.
But she has noticed them in their retreat
Of tea and café latte ambiance.
Oh, yes, she sees their pious nonchalance.
They give her quarters on the holidays
And she would give them stories with her gaze:
A childhood served on white enamel plates;
A father's drunk abuse; teen runaway;
The search for something—love, or merely dates—;
A candy-wrapper life in lingerie.
But eye contact is precious on the street.
She takes their pocket change and falls asleep.

And I'm no better in my arrogance
And its complacent little cubicle.
If I could be like Jesus, just for once,
I'd wake her up and make her beautiful.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His new poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.