This is the child

This is the child. He has not yet put out leaves.
His bare skin tastes the air; his naked eyes
know nothing but strange shapes. Nothing is named;
nothing is ago, nothing not yet. Death is that which dies,
and grief has yet no meaning and no size.
 
Where the wild harebell grows to a blue cave
and the climbing ant is a monster of green light
the child clings to his grassblade. The mountain range
lies like a pillow for his head at night,
the moon swings from his ceiling. He is a wave
that timeless moves through time, imperishably bright.

(From Judith Wright's “The World and the Child”)

Death and a maiden

About this day two years ago, I posted Judith Wright's poem “Woman to Child.” Pregnant myself, I found it fit for remembering Christ's birth and conjecturing what Mary's meditations on the subject might have been. This Christmas, three more Wright poems seem to me to resonate with the grand and tender mystery of the Incarnation. Here's the first one: “Woman's Song”, which precedes “Woman to Child” in the original sequence. It speaks to that dark and intimate bond a mother has with her unborn child, and the wonder tinged with fear that attends her expectation of birth. All births are both a losing and a finding, a looking forward to life as well as death, but especially this one; especially this day, this sunrise.

O move in me, my darling,
for now the sun must rise;
the sun that will draw open
the lids upon your eyes. 

O wake in me, my darling.
The knife of day is bright
to cut the thread that binds you
within the flesh of night. 

Today I lose and find you
whom yet my blood would keep —
would weave and sing around you
the spells and songs of sleep.  

None but I shall know you
as none but I have known;
yet there's a death and a maiden
who wait for you alone;
 
so move in me, my darling,
whose debt I cannot pay.
Pain and the dark must claim you,
and passion and the day.

This is just to say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

I loved this poem (it's William Carlos Williams) the first time I read it, without really knowing why. The paradox is, it's so brief and fragile too much attention would crush it, but at the same time so dense you could think endlessly about its meanings. I wondered why I loved it so.

First, I love the idea of ‘found poetry’, which is what some say this is - a note on the kitchen table whimsically arranged in verse. You could think of it as a poet being lazy, but I like to think of it as a poet being attentive to poetry as something absolute, like mathematics, there in the universe for us to see or not see as our minds allow. I've always considered poetry - and maths, for that matter - miraculous.

Next, I love the form - and here's another paradox: it's in one way so formless, and in another so acutely formal that form is almost the only thing about it. There is no punctuation as such, but the sequence of words teaches you how to read it. The first two stanzas run together, one sentence, and it's only in the third that the line-ends open onto space and silence, an effect that's partly the syntax and partly the sense.

There's a lot you could say about the clues to character and narrative in the first two stanzas, and a lot has been said about the myth of forbidden fruit and so on, but what I love most I think is the shock of the resolution: the way it goes from the routine of breakfast to the ritual of forgiveness, the sacramental sweetness of the fruit. The ordered, humdrum rhythms of a household give way to a sudden lush immersion in the senses. We go from the mechanics of life to the experience of living. That final moment suspends time, refuses to end the poem, leaves us still tasting those delicious plums.

And here is the power of poetry: it describes life as it is lived, in its timeless moments, and in doing so makes it beautiful, makes it sacred. It's the adjectives - “so sweet and so cold” - not the verbs, that make life worth living.

How great is that darkness

Imagine my delight when I found this record of my favourite author in conversation with my favourite president. This exchange between Barack Obama and Marilynne Robinson (one of his favourite authors) is an articulate peregrination through contemporary politics, theology and literature. Reading their conversation feels like a glimpse into the kind of exalted correspondence that winds up in a presidential library, or a literary museum.

They talk about a persistent “us versus them” mentality in America, in which Christians are especially implicated. The President asks: “How do you reconcile the idea of [...] taking faith seriously with the fact that, at least in our democracy and our civic discourse, it seems as if folks who take religion the most seriously sometimes are also those who are suspicious of those not like them?” Ms Robinson replies: “Well, I don’t know how seriously they do take their Christianity [...]. I mean, when people are turning in on themselves—and God knows, arming themselves and so on—against the imagined other, they’re not taking their Christianity seriously.” She goes on to say that “Christianity is profoundly counterintuitive—‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’—which I think properly understood means your neighbor is as worthy of love as you are, not that you’re actually going to be capable of this sort of superhuman feat. But you’re supposed to run against the grain. It’s supposed to be difficult. It’s supposed to be a challenge.”

Meanwhile, in a lecture named for his favourite Prime Minister, our recent Prime Minister has argued that Christianity must disown itself in order to preserve itself. Or at least that the West should disown Christianity's central idea in order to preserve its Christian character. “Love thy neighbour,” runs his argument, was never meant to apply to people who are not like us, whose preservation might require our sacrifice. Christ, no. Mr Abbott might do well to heed the warning Robinson gives in her new essay “Fear,” which she and Obama discuss: “When Christians abandon Christian standards of behavior in the defense of Christianity [...] they inflict harm that would not be in the power of any enemy. As Christians they risk the kind of harm to themselves to which the Bible applies adjectives like ‘everlasting.’”