Mia Anderson

Mia Anderson is a Canadian poet, Anglican priest, and retired actress. She is the author of seven poetry collections — including her brand new book O is for Christmas: a Midwinter Night's Dream (2024, St Thomas Poetry Series). Her first collection Appetite appeared from Brick Books in 1988. Around that time she twice won the Malahat Long Poem Prize.

She spent some 25 years as an actress in Canada and Britain — including five seasons at Ontario’s Stratford Festival — but left that behind to receive her MDiv in 2000 to become a priest. With her fourth book The Sunrise Liturgy (2012, Wipf & Stock), her most theological book to date, she joined the long tradition within the Anglican Church of poet-priests.

The foreword to her new book is written by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams.

In 2013, the following poem won the $20,000 Montreal International Poetry Prize.

The Antenna

For Mike Endicott

The antenna is a growth not always
functional in all people.

Some can hoist their antenna with
remarkable ease—like greased lightning.

In some it is broken, stuck there in its old winged
fin socket way down under the shiny surface

never to issue forth.
Others make do with a little mobility,

a little reception, a sudden spurt of music
and joy, an aberrant hope.

And some—the crazies,
the fools of God—drive around

or sit or even sleep
with this great thin-as-a-thread

home-cobbled monkey-wrenched filament
teetering above their heads

and picking up the great I AM like
some hacker getting Patmos on his toaster.

And some, with WD40 or jig-a-loo
or repeated attempts to pry the thing up

or chisel at the socket
do not give up on this antenna

because they have heard of how it works
sometimes, how when the nights are clear

and the stars just so and the new moon has all but set,
the distant music of the spheres is transformative

and they believe in the transformation.
It is the antenna they have difficulty believing in.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

Gwenallt

Gwenallt (1899―1968) is a Welsh poet, born as David James Jones, who adopted Gwenallt as his bardic name which he created “by transposing Alltwen, the name of the village across the river from his birthplace”. At age 16 he joined the Marxist Labour Party, and during the latter part of WWI was imprisoned as a conscientious objector. After the war he studied Welsh, and by 1927 was appointed Lecturer in the Welsh Department of University College Wales, Aberystwyth.

He outgrew the political idealism of his youth, but also faced disillusionment with other structures. He was passed over, time and again, for a professorship by college authorities, and he was unsettled in his search for a spiritual home ― reacting strongly to what was said or done by church leadership. He was raised as a Nonconformist, flirted with Catholicism, became a member of the Church of Wales for many years, but ended his days as a member of a Methodist Chapel at Aberystwyth.

Gwenallt wrote his poetry in Welsh, and the first of his five poetry collections, Ysgubau’r Awen (1939), was published to much critical acclaim; in time he became a major voice in Welsh poetry. He also eventually wrote two novels, although his poetry remains more influential. He is noteworthy for his passionate, spiritual voice, his precise local imagery, and the universal significance of his themes.

Here are two English versions of one of Gwenallt’s poems ― which I include for comparison, and to demonstrate how the translating of poetry is akin to writing the poem afresh, hopefully as close to the spirit of the original as possible. The first version was translated by Patrick Thomas ― from Sensuous Glory: The Poetic Vision of D. Gwenallt Jones (2000, Canterbury Press); and the second is translated by Rowan Williams, from his book Headwaters (2008, Perpetua Press). Patrick Thomas and Rowan Williams have both granted me permission to include their translations.

Sin

When we strip off every kind of dress,
The cloak of respectability and wise knowledge,
The cloth of culture and the silks of learning;
The soul's so bare, so uncleanly naked:
The primitive mud is in our poor matter,
The beast's slime is in our marrow and our blood,
The bow's arrow is between our finger and thumb
And the savage dance is in our feet.
As we wander through the original, free forest,
We find between the branches a piece of Heaven,
Where the saints sing anthems of grace and faith,
The Magnificat of His salvation;
We raise our nostrils up like wolves
Baying for the Blood that redeemed us.

Sin

Take off the business suit, the old-school tie,
The gown, the cap, drop the reviews, awards,
Certificates, stand naked in your sty,
A little carnivore, clothed in dried turds.
The snot that slowly fills our passages
Seeps up from hollows where the dead beasts lie;
Dumb stamping dances spell our messages,
We only know what makes our arrows fly.
Lost in the wood, we sometimes glimpse the sky
Between the branches, and the words drop down
We cannot hear, the alien voices high
And hard, singing salvation, grace, life, dawn.
Like wolves, we lift our snouts: Blood, blood, we cry,
The blood that bought us so we need not die.

This post was suggested by my friend Burl Horniachek.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

Sally Ito*

Sally Ito is a poet and writer who has four poetry collections, including her new book Heart’s Hydrography (2022, Turnstone). She is an adjunct Professor of English at Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg.

Rowan Williams (the former Archbishop of Canterbury) has written about this collection, “Winter landscapes, water landscapes, the landscapes of family love and frustration, and of the soul’s seasons―all these are mapped by Sally Ito with deep compassion and rich tactile imagery. Everyday perceptions made radiant.”

Sally has recently teamed up with Sarah Klassen and Joanne Epp to translate poetry from Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg for Burl Horniachek’s anthology To Heaven’s Rim: The Kingdom Poets Book of World Christian Poetry (2023, Poiema/Cascade).

The following poem Sally Ito wrote for me when I was seeking poetry related to the Biblical Stations of the Cross for Imago’s Toronto Arts Exhibition “Crossings: A Journey to Easter” which was presented in 2022. It is also the final poem in Heart’s Hydrography.

The Cross Speaks

I was a tree once, and of one body
that grew upward into the sky
and downward into the soil.

Many were the seasons of my life
until it ended with the ax.

Only the human would make out of my death
something out of the death of their God,
my dead body carried by him
who will die for them.

Still, I will lift him, and become the tree I once was
and I will bear him, as he bore me
and be planted once more
in the dark soil of my Creator’s nurturing.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Sally Ito: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

David Scott

David Scott (1947―2022) is an English poet and Anglican priest who gained attention by winning the 1978 Sunday Times/BBC Poetry Competition. This helped lead to the first of his six poetry books, A Quiet Gathering, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1986. He is best known for his poetry, but he also wrote several plays for the National Youth Music Theatre with Jeremy James Taylor, and six books about the Christian faith, including, Moments of Prayer, and The Mind of Christ.

He was vicar of Torpenhow and Allhallows in Cumbria, then Rector of St Lawrence, was an honorary canon of Winchester Cathedral, and an honorary fellow of the University of Winchester. David Scott also served as poetry reviewer for The Church Times.

In 2008 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, conferred a Lambeth Degree Doctorate of Letters (DLitt) on him “in recognition of his contribution to deepening the spiritual life of the Church through his standing as a poet and his teaching ministry…”

In 2010 David Scott took an early retirement, due to ill health. He died this past October.

The following poem is from Beyond the Drift ― New and Selected Poems, (2014, Bloodaxe Books).

Retirement

I’ll go into a wood, a barn, a room
and not come out until my heart
is settled back on God the pivot,
I the balance. A chance for poise
to get my giddy head becalmed
into stillness that absorbs. I wonder what?
Things I dare not write for fear
they might be so, the illness worse,
or better.
I’ll enter into converse with my soul
and hope again to learn a love for others,
and of others love for me.
To stop doing one thing, and discover
what refuses to be laid aside.
Nothing new perhaps; just former things
attentively revived.

This post was suggested by my friend Burl Horniachek.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

Rowan Williams*

Rowan Williams is a Welsh poet who served as Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002 to 2012. Prior to this appointment he was Bishop of Monmouth and Archbishop of Wales. His earlier career was that of an academic at both Oxford and Cambridge, and subsequently he has served (until last September) as Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge.

His most-recent poetry collection is The Other Mountain (2014, Carcanet). His earlier books ― After Silent Centuries (1994) and Remembering Jerusalem (2001) ― were brought together in The Poems of Rowan Williams (2002) which also includes some newer poems. His New and Collected Poems will appear from Carcanet in November.

Door

The Lord is Always Liminal

A book falling open, the sliced wood
peels apart, jolting for a moment
over the clenched swollen muscle:
so that, as the leaves fall flat
side by side, what we read is the two
ragged eyes each side of a mirror,
where the wrinkles stream off sideways,
trail down the cheeks, awash with tears,
mucus, mascara. Split the wood
and I am there, says the unfamiliar
Lord, there where the book opens
with the leaves nailed to the wall
and the silent knot resolved by surgery
into a mask gaping and staring, reading
and being read. Split the wood; jolt
loose the cramp, the tumour, let the makeup run,
the sap drain, the door swing in the draught.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Rowan Williams: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock.

Gerard Smyth

Gerard Smyth is a Dublin poet who has authored ten poetry collections, the most recent of which is The Sundays of Eternity (2020, Dedalus Press). His earliest poetry appeared in the late ‘60s, including his first book The Flags Are Quiet (1969, New Writers’ Press). He spent his entire professional life as a journalist with The Irish Times, where he still serves as Poetry Editor.

Three of his poems are included in the landmark issue of Poetry Ireland Review (#112 ― Name and Nature: ‘Who do you say that I am?’) edited by John F. Deane, which includes poetry by Seamus Heaney, Pádraig J. Daly, and Rowan Williams.

The first of the following poems was inspired by the large-scale painting “Blue Crucifixion” by Hughie O’Donoghue. The second one, written at the beginning of our current pandemic, has been set to music by British composer Philip Lawton for the choir of Berlin's Passionskirche (Church of the Passion).

Blue Crucifixion

for Clare and Hughie O’Donoghue

Not the crudely sketched
man of sorrows
from the cover-image
of the old school catechism
that was touched
and smudged so much
it lost its mystic fragrance.

And not Gauguin’s Yellow Christ
in the Breton countryside,
a Golgotha made strange
by those maids in attendance.
Or Poussin’s Redeemer
down from the Cross
under the gaze of the spellbound.

But the Blue Crucifixion
shows a fleshy semblance
of human wreckage that belongs
to a man who was counted
among the transgressors.
Our idea of him electrified
by such mystery as art requires.

Isolation

Bunched together like a gathering tribe
the daffodils rise again and there are signs
of sun behind the clouds.
We still have bread and books
and songs to keep the radio alive.
A note through the door is a kind surprise
and birds on the branches
of the trees outside stay up late.
The mornings are not so dark,
the internet takes us to the works of art,
tunes us in to Debussy or Paul Simon,
brings us close to the faraway country
where loved ones are.
A kite above someone’s back garden
rises and dips and gives a moment of joy
to a face in the window of isolation.

March 17th-19th, 2020

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.

Ann Griffiths

Ann Griffiths (1776—1805) is a Welsh hymnwriter who, as a young woman, was deeply influenced by the Methodist Revival. There are no pictures of her, but this effigy (from the Ann Griffiths Memorial Chapel at Dolanog) is based on descriptions of her. According to E. Wyn James of Cardiff University, “Ann’s hymns have long been regarded as one of the highlights of Welsh literature, and since the mid-nineteenth century she herself has become a prominent icon in Welsh-speaking Wales.”

This is particularly remarkable considering that Griffiths received little education and lived in the same remote farmhouse “Dolwar Fach” her entire life. Only 70 stanzas of her verse survive, mostly due to the efforts of her spiritual mentor John Hughes, and his wife Ruth who had been a maidservant at Dolwar Fach and a close friend of Ann’s.

Known as Ann Thomas for most of her life, she had only been married ten months — following the birth and death of her only child, a daughter — when Ann passed away.

The following translation by Rowan Williams, though beautiful in its own right, does not seek to maintain the complex musicality of the original Welch. It takes an image from Song of Songs (attributed to Solomon) and turns it around — seeing Jesus as the Rose of Sharon from the perspective of the bride.

I Saw Him Standing

Under the dark trees, there he stands,
there he stands; shall he not draw my eyes?
I thought I knew a little
how he compels, beyond all things, but now
he stands there in the shadows. It will be
Oh, such a daybreak, such bright morning,
when I shall wake to see him
as he is.

He is called Rose of Sharon, for his skin
is clear, his skin is flushed with blood,
his body lovely and exact; how he compels
beyond ten thousand rivals. There he stands,
my friend, the friend of guilt and helplessness,
to steer my hollow body
over the sea.

The earth is full of masks and fetishes,
what is there here for me? are these like him?
Keep company with him and you will know:
no kin, no likeness to those empty eyes.
He is a stranger to them all, great Jesus.
What is there here for me? I know
what I have longed for. Him to hold
me always.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Ann Griffiths: second 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.

John Milbank

John Milbank is Director of the Centre of Theology and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. Last summer he retired from his position as Nottingham's Research Professor of Religion, Ethics, and Politics. He has also taught at the universities of Virginia, Cambridge and Lancaster. As a student he studied under Rowan Williams.

Of his three poetry collections, The Dances of Albion (2015, Shrearsman Books) is most recent. As a poet he is more focused on British mythology and fairy tales than theology.

He is, however, better known as a theologian — particularly for founding the "Radical Orthodoxy" movement — and is the author of several influential books including, Theology and Social Theory, and The Suspended Middle. He is sceptical of secular reason, and critical of liberalism.

Considering Lilies

Looking for rain,
celestial water
above all ponds,
the weed-lilies of convulvulus
in September foregather in the hedgerows
like white bells for a late marriage
of a still beautiful virgin,
their pure glamour disparaged,
as gypsy-women are the tares of queendom,
more savagely still in their darkness
and more blowingly resplendent
through its untamed virtue.

Returning on the train in hope
after many years
of a better consummation, he
recalled the school bell’s autumn sound
which once confirmed yet interrupted
his childhood rural pasturage.
It had reached attractively and insidiously
across all fields and past them,
suspending forever nature’s mute
untimetabled instruction.
So we probe the stars with signals,
travel anywhere in lines and pay
in numbers if we get them right
for anything available.

While nature lost still stays our course,
like a vast golden shadow of background,
ever forgotten, ever present
to accuse us of a wholly inadequate answer
to her perennial welcome.
Why do the skies alter, the seas surge and yet
the earth stays firm on which we are planted
in order to till, walk ever onwards,
look upwards that we might re-consider always?
Shifting the soils like a horde of phantoms
has got us nowhere.
Gridding the earth with waves and networks
has communicated to us nothing.

The road bends: he longs to linger
by the gate’s opening perchance
to greet her. Lone winds leave
the fascinating clouds from which
the dark birds also swarm. The willowherb
grows in this season more freely than the grasses.

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.

Geoffrey Hill*

Geoffrey Hill (1932—2016), who has been called Britain's greatest post-war poet, died on June 30th at his home in Cambridge, England. He had taught at Boston University for 18 years, and from 2010 to 2015 held the position of Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.

Rowan Williams recently wrote in The Guardian that Hill's poetry has
-----"a sheer fluency with sound that can appear in lyrical elegance,
-----grinding puns, carefully calculated shifts of tone or register,
-----[and] multilingual play. He speaks from deep inside his language.
-----The reader sees the ripple on the surface, puzzling, even
-----apparently arbitrary; but not the fathoms-down movement on the
-----seabed. To read with understanding, you have to join him down
-----there..."

He was knighted Sir Geoffrey Hill in 2012. Broken Hierarchies: Collected Poems 1952-2012 was published by Oxford University Press in 2013. His wife, Alice Goodman, is an Anglican Priest.

Tenebrae

He was so tired that he was scarcely able to hear a note of the songs: he felt imprisoned in a cold region where his brain was numb and his spirit was isolated.

1
Requite this angel whose
flushed and thirsting face
stoops to the sacrifice
out of which it arose.
This is the lord Eros
of grief who pities
no one; it is
Lazarus with his sores.

2
And you, who with your soft but searching voice
drew me out of the sleep where I was lost,
who held me near your heart that I might rest
confiding in the darkness of your choice:
possessed by you I chose to have no choice,
fulfilled in you I sought no further quest.
You keep me, now, in dread that quenches trust,
in desolation where my sins rejoice.
As I am passionate so you with pain
turn my desire; as you seem passionless
so I recoil from all that I would gain,
wounding myself upon forgetfulness,
false ecstasies, which you in truth sustain
as you sustain each item of your cross.

3
Veni Redemptor, but not in our time.
Christus Resurgens, quite out of this world.
‘Ave’ we cry; the echoes are returned.
Amor Carnalis is our dwelling-place.

4
O light of light, supreme delight;
grace on our lips to our disgrace.
Time roosts on all such golden wrists;
our leanness is our luxury.
Our love is what we love to have;
our faith is in our festivals.

5
Stupefying images of grief-in-dream,
succubae to my natural grief of heart,
cling to me, then; you who will not desert
your love nor lose him in some blank of time.
You come with all the licence of her name
to tell me you are mine. But you are not
and she is not. Can my own breath be hurt
by breathless shadows groaning in their game?
It can. The best societies of hell
acknowledge this, aroused by what they know:
consummate rage recaptured there in full
as faithfulness demands it, blow for blow,
and rectitude that mimics its own fall
reeling with sensual abstinence and woe.

6
This is the ash-pit of the lily-fire,
this is the questioning at the long tables,
this is true marriage of the self-in-self,
this is a raging solitude of desire,
this is the chorus of obscene consent,
this is a single voice of purest praise.

7
He wounds with ecstasy. All
the wounds are his own.
He wears the martyr’s crown.
He is the Lord of Misrule.
He is the Master of the Leaping Figures,
the motley factions.
Revelling in auguries
he is the Weeper of the Valedictions.

8
Music survives, composing her own sphere,
Angel of Tones, Medusa, Queen of the Air,
and when we would accost her with real cries
silver on silver thrills itself to ice.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Geoffrey Hill: first post

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.

Vernon Watkins

Vernon Watkins (1906—1967) is a Welsh Poet who grew up in Swansea, and is associated with his close friend Dylan Thomas. He also knew William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and Philip Larkin. His parents were nonconformists, but Watkins' education, including his time at Cambridge University, influenced him to join the Church of England. At the time of his death he had published seven collections of his own poetry with Faber & Faber — including The Lady with the Unicorn (1948) and The Death Bell (1954) — and had selected the poems for his eighth. Several subsequent books also gradually appeared from his previously unpublished work. His Collected Poems (1986) includes more than 500 poems.

Watkins was devoted in his friendship to Dylan Thomas, even though his friend was unreliable. Thomas, who was supposed to be the best man at Watkins' wedding, never showed up. Unsurprisingly, only one half of their extensive correspondence survives — the half received by Watkins.

Watkins had suffered a breakdown in 1927, as he sought to come to terms with the direction of his life. According to Jane L. McCormick, this was when "...he began the long-avoided struggle with God that is the mystic's first step toward spiritual rebirth; and from then till the day of his death, love of God was foremost in his life."

Since his death the poetry of Vernon Watkins has slipped from public attention. Rowan Williams argues that Watkins' is a significant twentieth century voice, worthy of our attention.

Infant Noah

Calm the boy sleeps, though death is in the clouds.
Smiling he sleeps, and dreams of that tall ship
Moored near the dead stars and the moon in shrouds,
Built out of light, whose faith his hands equip.
It was imagined when remorse of making
Winged the bent, brooding brows of God in doubt.
All distances were narrowed to his waking:
"I built his city, then I cast him out."
Time's great tide falls; under that tide the sands
Turn, and the world is shown there thousand-hilled
To the opening, ageless eyes. On eyelids, hands,
Falls a dove's shade, God's cloud, a velvet leaf.
And his shut eyes hold heaven in their dark sheaf,
In whom the rainbow's covenant is fulfilled.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

Malcolm Guite

Malcolm Guite is an Anglican priest, and author of several books, including the study Faith, Hope and Poetry. Rowan Williams describes it as “a profound theology of the imagination”, and Luci Shaw praises Guite as “a poet and scholar of the highest order”. He serves as Chaplain at Cambridge University’s Girton College, and is a singer/guitarist for the blues band “Mystery Train”. His verse follows traditional poetic formats. Two of his significant literary influences are Coleridge and C.S. Lewis.

The following poem is from Malcolm Guite’s new book of sonnets, Sounding the Seasons, which will be published by Canterbury Press this year.

St. Thomas the Apostle

“We do not know… how can we know the way?”
Courageous master of the awkward question,
You spoke the words the others dared not say
And cut through their evasion and abstraction.
Oh doubting Thomas, father of my faith,
You put your finger on the nub of things
We cannot love some disembodied wraith,
But flesh and blood must be our king of kings.
Your teaching is to touch, embrace, anoint,
Feel after Him and find Him in the flesh.
Because He loved your awkward counter-point
The Word has heard and granted you your wish.
Oh place my hands with yours, help me divine
The wounded God whose wounds are healing mine.

Posted with permission of the poet.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Malcolm Guite: second post, third post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca

Rowan Williams

Rowan Williams is a Welsh poet, born of Welsh-speaking parents. He has recently become internationally known since he became the Archbishop of Canterbury in December of 2002.

In 2009 he gave an address on poetry — speaking primarily of favourite poets associated with the south bank of the Thames — Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Keats and Blake — having an actor read several of their poems. Rowan Williams said:
--------“There's an element for every poet of necessity in
--------what he or she says...[T]he poet doesn't simply say,
--------‘you might say it this way’ or ‘here's a thought’.
--------The poet says, ‘I can't not say this.’ And that, ‘I
--------can't not say this’ is where the pressure, the
--------integrity of poetry comes from. Poetry loses its
--------integrity when it's either trying to be clever or
--------trying to get a message across with a capital ‘m’.
--------That doesn't mean that poetry is uninterested in
--------morality... [T]here's no more moral poet in the
--------English language than William Blake. But as soon
--------as poetry becomes a rhyming version of good advice
--------it loses its energy. It loses its sense of necessity.”

He has published several collections of poetry, including, Headwaters: Poems of Rowan Williams. He has also translated poetry from Welsh and Russian.

Advent Calendar

He will come like last leaf's fall.
One night when the November wind
has flayed the trees to bone, and earth
wakes choking on the mould,
the soft shroud's folding.

He will come like frost.
One morning when the shrinking earth
opens on mist, to find itself
arrested in the net
of alien, sword-set beauty.

He will come like dark.
One evening when the bursting red
December sun draws up the sheet
and penny-masks its eye to yield
the star-snowed fields of sky.

He will come, will come,
will come like crying in the night,
like blood, like breaking,
as the earth writhes to toss him free.
He will come like child.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Rowan Williams: second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca