Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou (1928―2014) is a popular American poet, famous for the seven autobiographies she wrote, beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) which first brought her fame.

She started her performance career as a dancer in the 1950s, touring Europe in a production of Porgy and Bess, releasing an album, and singing her own songs in the 1957 film Calypso Heat Wave. She was an active supporter of Martin Luther King Jr. after hearing him speak at a Harlem church in 1960. Years later she read one of her poems at the inauguration of President Bill Clinton.

There is a poem in circulating on the internet called “I am a Christian” falsely attributed to Angelou. She was sometimes hesitant to make such a claim, seeing it as a declaration of having achieved holiness. She did say, though,
-----“I have always tried to find myself a church. I have studied
-----everything. I spent some time with Zen Buddhism and Judaism
-----and I spent some time with Islam. I am a religious person. It
-----is my spirit, but I found that I really want to be a Christian.
-----That is what my spirit seems to be built on. I just know that
-----I find the teachings of Christ so accessible. I really believe
-----that Christ made a sacrifice and for those reasons I want to be
-----a Christian.”

Savior

Petulant priests, greedy
centurions, and one million
incensed gestures stand
between your love and me.

Your agape sacrifice
is reduced to colored glass,
vapid penance, and the
tedium of ritual.

Your footprints yet
mark the crest of
billowing seas but
your joy
fades upon the tablets
of ordained prophets.

Visit us again, Savior.
Your children, burdened with
disbelief, blinded by a patina
of wisdom,
carom down this vale of
fear. We cry for you
although we have lost
your name.

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.

Shann Ray

Shann Ray is a poet and writer who teaches at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington. His first poetry collection Balefire (2014) won the High Plains Book Award for poetry, and his short story collection American Masculine (2011, Graywolf) received the American Book Award. He also writes social science as Shann Ray Ferch. His work has appeared in such publications as Poetry, Esquire, and McSweeney’s, and has received numerous awards besides those already mentioned.

Shann spent part of his childhood on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Southeast Montana, which is reflected in his writing ― including in his novel American Copper, which deals with issues of the horrific colonization of the Cheyenne people.

His new poetry book Atomic Theory 7: poems to my wife and God (2020, Wipf & Stock) also features the work of visual artist Trinh Mai.

The following poem previously appeared in Diode, and is from Atomic Theory 7.

from sundown

two things dostoyevski said:
beauty will save the world
and nothing is more beautiful than Christ

tell us of your stark trees Christ
standing cold with their limbs to the sky

place our hands into the coarse black coat of winter wolves

we cannot un-name you God
what does Christ even mean
she and i cannot un-remember you

tell me of your sky a red field behind the trees
and how you drink water through rock

Lord of wonder Lord of night
where dark smudges the world rim
blast us with wind and light

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 F. Deane*

John F. Deane is an Irish poet from Achill Island. His numerous poetry collections include Snow Falling on Chestnut Hill: New and Selected Poems (2012) and Dear Pilgrims (2018) both from Carcanet. His contributions to the art of poetry in Ireland, to the rest of the English-speaking world and even well beyond that, are significant. He has received such awards as the O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry, and has been named Chevalier, Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. On a personal note, I have found Deane to be one of the poets who most speaks to me in recent years.

His poetry can be found in several Irish anthologies, and is one of the poets I featured in the International anthology, The Turning Aside: The Kingdom Poets Book of Contemporary Christian Poetry.

In reading his book Give Dust a Tongue: A Faith & Poetry Memoir (2015, Columba) I was taken with his vision to participate in fulfilling “the need for our world and age to forge a poetry of personal encounter with Jesus” ― a significant calling, and a quest worth pursuing! He tells me that his new collection Naming of the Bones is to appear from Carcanet in November of 2021.

The following poem first appeared in The Christian Century and is from his recent collection Dear Pilgrims.

The Whole World Over

Budapest

I see him, mariner Jesus, walking on corrupted
waters of the Danube while down in silted depths
lurk the unexploded bombs of lately wars; I walk out,
hand in hand with the poem, crossing on the high

redemption bridge, to earth corrupted by tar and concrete,
where down in the darkly shiftless soil words crawl,
eyeless and eager. Between sleep and day, light
and black, I grow conscious of compelling truths—

but something in the ego-wassailing of flesh compels me
back to comfort, and something in the slippery
eel-mud of the mind eases towards sleep, though always

Jesus plods on over all the corrupted waters
heading for the unforgiving hill, for his piercing
cry of forgiveness out-into-the-outraged world.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about John F. Deane: first 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.

Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire (1821―1867) is a French writer whose style of prose-poems was influential for the following generation of French poets. He is also known as an art critic ― championing Delacroix ― and for his translations into French of Edgar Allan Poe. His biographers suggest that the sense of abandonment he felt during childhood, at his mother’s remarriage after his father’s death, was traumatic for him and contributed to his later excesses.

His first poetry collection The Flowers of Evil (1857) received both praise and passionate opposition, due to its scandalous content. He was prosecuted for creating an offense against public morals, which resulted in fines for himself, his publisher, and the printer.

Burl Horniachek expresses, in a new article about Baudelaire’s prose-poems in The McMaster Journal of Theology & Ministry, that for many years he believed strongly in human depravity, but not in the possibility of redemption. Horniachek says:
-----“One might wonder why Christians in particular should be
-----interested in a poet with such a reputation for Satanism
-----and blasphemy… His poetry is suffused with Christian imagery,
-----and frequently addresses serious theological issues.
-----Furthermore, it should not be a surprise that Baudelaire
-----eventually did have a sincere religious conversion to Catholic
-----Christianity later in life, well before his death bed.”

The following poem, translated by South African poet Roy Campbell, was written after Baudelaire’s conversion ―which happened four years prior to his death.

The Unforeseen

Harpagon watched his father slowly dying
And musing on his white lips as they shrunk,
Said, "There is lumber in the outhouse lying
It seems: old boards and junk."

Celimene cooed, and said, "How good I am
And, naturally, God made my looks excell"
(Her callous heart, thrice-smoked like salted ham,
Will burn in endless Hell!)

A smoky scribbler, to himself a beacon,
Says to the wretch whom he has plunged in shade —
"Where's the Creator you so loved to speak on,
The Saviour you portrayed?"

But best of all I know a certain rogue
Who yawns and weeps, lamenting night and day
(Impotent fathead) in the same old brogue,
"I will be good — one day!"

The clock says in a whisper, "He is ready
The damned one, whom I warned of his disaster.
He's blind, and deaf, and like a wall unsteady,
Where termites mine the plaster."

Then one appeared whom all of them denied
And said with mocking laughter "To my manger
You've all come; to the Black Mass I provide
Not one of you's a stranger.

You've built me temples in your hearts of sin.
You've kissed my buttocks in your secret mirth.
Know me for Satan by this conquering grin,
As monstrous as the Earth.

D'you think, poor hypocrites surprised red-handed
That you can trick your lord without a hitch;
And that by guile two prizes can be landed —
Heaven, and being rich?

The wages of the huntsman is his quarry,
Which pays him for the chills he gets while stalking
Companions of my revels grim and sorry
I am going to take you walking,

Down through the denseness of the soil and rock,
Down through the dust and ash you leave behind,
Into a palace, built in one sole block,
Of stone that is not kind:

For it is built of Universal Sin
And holds of me all that is proud and glorious"
— Meanwhile an angel, far above the din,
Sends forth a peal victorious

For all whose hearts can say, "I bless thy rod;
And blessed be the griefs that on us fall.
My soul is but a toy, Eternal God,
Thy wisdom all in all!"

And so deliciously that trumpet blows
On evenings of celestial harvestings,
It makes a rapture in the hearts of those
Whose love and praise it sings.

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.

Franz Werfel

Franz Werfel (1890―1945) is one of the leading writers of pre-Nazi Austria. When his first poetry collection appeared in 1911, he befriended such German-speaking Jewish writers as Max Broad and Franz Kafka at Prague’s Café Arco. He soon moved to Leipzig, and during the war to Vienna.

Werfel was born into a Jewish family in Prague, though was influenced profoundly by his Czech nanny who secretly took him to Roman Catholic masses. He found himself in the no man’s land between the two religions, finding Judaism forbidding, but being drawn to the piety of the nanny he affectionately called Babi. The light she was for his life appears again and again in his writing, although in his early work he explored many religions.

In the 1920s he produced historic pieces ― Verdi: A Novel of the Opera, and plays such as Juarez and Maximilian. His 1928 play, Paul Among the Jews, combined his fascination with history and his conflicted interest in both his heritage and Christianity. For more than ten years, Franz Werfel had an affair with Alma, the widow of composer Gustav Mahler, before she agreed finally to marry him in 1929 on the condition that he renounce Judaism.

Franz and Alma, fled from the Nazis during WWII ― first to Paris, and then to Lourdes on their way to America. Werfel became fascinated with the story of Bernadette, which he vowed to make his next priority. Werfel’s best-selling novel The Song of Bernadette (1941) became a Hollywood film in 1943 ― starring Jennifer Jones, who won the Best Actress Oscar in the role. Franz Werfel was officially baptized into the Catholic Church shortly before his death.

The Snowfall

Oh the slow fall of snow,
Its unending blanketing swirl!
Yet my mind's eye was giving shape
To what couldn't be kept hidden,
That in the white drifts each fleck
Is known, weighed, counted.

Oh you spinning dancing flakes,
Your tiny souls and personalities
Withstand gravity, weightlessness, wind,
In your coming and going
I see your destinies glide down,
Which you begin, fulfill, begin ...

This one falls soft and like wool,
The next is crystal and tenacious,
The third's a clenched fist of struggle.
Yet their white realm disperses by morning,
Thus one doesn't die from the rest,
And they dissolve into the purest drop shapes.

Oh the world's slow falling snow,
That race's dense, blanketing swirl!
It perishes and not one fate melts alone.
We melt, but we are left behind
When death, the way spring wind thaws, overtakes
Us drops and comes together home in the womb.

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.

Angeline Schellenberg*

Angeline Schellenberg is a Winnipeg poet, and the author of the new collection Fields of Light and Stone (2020, University of Alberta Press). The poems are, as Don McKay says, “acts of remembrance that are all the more poetic for being scrupulously plainspoken…” He also describes them as “a series of love letters to the dead” which says a lot of how Angeline Schellenberg, in these poems, commemorates her Mennonite grandparents, while thoughtfully considering the heritage they passed down to her. Her first full-length collection, Tell Them It Was Mozart, was published by Brick Books in 2016.

Although I was already well aware of her poetry, I only first met Angeline Schellenberg in Winnipeg in 2019 at the inaugural Faith In Form arts conference, which was organized by Burl Horniachek.

The following poem is from Fields of Light and Stone.

Generations

1586: as far back
as the Mennonite database
can take me.

All I find: the surname Voht,
a town called Culm.

My great-great-great-
great-great-great-
great-great-great-

great-great-grandfather
had a daughter
who had a baby.
And on it goes.

What chases us down a family tree?
A high forehead?
A voice? A fear?

What drives me to scratch
the earth for these four-letter
kernels?

Voht’s daughter named her son
Hans―God is gracious,
a promise I can translate.

But I cannot hear
the plea it answered.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Angeline Schellenberg: first 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.

Andrew Lansdown*

Andrew Lansdown is one of Australia’s most-significant poets. The newest of his 15 poetry collections has just appeared as part of the Poiema Poetry Series from Cascade Books ― Abundance: New & Selected Poems. I am honoured to have edited this important collection with Andrew, and am pleased to be able to help expand his influence in North America. In Australia his poetry has won a number of prestigious awards, including the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award (twice), and the Adelaide Festival of Arts’ John Bray National Poetry Award.

In A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Australian Poetry, Geoff Page wrote:
----------Lansdown is able to suggest very deftly and concisely
----------the so-called ‘thisness’ of things, especially things
----------in nature… Lansdown has a very sincere and direct way
----------of handling poems about his immediate family which
----------subtly suggests great tenderness without becoming
----------sentimental… They have a descriptive exactness and a
----------seeming spontaneity, combining to produce a text to
----------which one can imagine no change being made without damage.

In recent years, Lansdown has explored his fascination with Japanese poetry and culture ― writing in Japanese forms such as Haiku and Tanka, honouring Basho and other influential Japanese poets, and visiting Japan to encounter its cherry-blossom beauty and the hollow solitude of Buddhist shrines.

The following poem first appeared in The McMaster Journal of Theology & Ministry.

The Martyred Mother

i.m. Hashimoto Tecla and her children, Kyoto, 1619 AD

I speak not of the other four children
who were condemned with her, nor even of
the newest child in her womb, but only
of the smallest one bound to her bosom.

One might have imagined the rope would burn
through fast so the baby’s body would fall
away from hers—slump free from the torso
to which it was tied as if to a stake.

And yet it seems the persecutors’ cord
bore the flames better than the martyrs’ flesh.
Perhaps they had soaked that rope in water
before they wrapped it around their victims.

Still, hemp’s surely coarser, tougher than flesh.
How long would it take for flames to fray it?
Longer, I guess, than it would take to melt
fat in an infant’s cheek, a woman’s breast.

Whether wet or dry, thick or thin, that rope
held out long enough for the flames to fuse
the child to its mother’s chest, meld the two
into one greasy charred misshapen lump.

On the fumie the faithful won’t trample
the carved Madonna clasps the destined Child—
in like manner, but with bound and burned arms,
the martyred mother held her infant fast.

And in this embrace both she and the babe
defied the shogun and exposed his shame.
Their souls rode up in palanquins of smoke,
up to their Sovereign, who wept as they came.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Andrew Lansdown: first 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.