Lenten Devotional
March 3, 2018

Poems for Lent
 
"Teach of the inward Voice, and
help all generations to listen in the Silence"
Psalm 78:3 (Nan C. Merrill)


From When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone
By Galway Kinnell

3
When one has lived a long time alone,
among regrets so immense the past occupies
nearly all the room there is in consciousness,
one notices in the snake's eyes, which see behind
without giving any less attention to the future,
the opaque, milky-blue cloudiness that comes
when the snake is about to throw its skin
and become new-meanwhile continuing,
of course, to grow old-the exact bleu passé
that bleaches the corneas of the blue-eyed
when they lie back at the end and look for heaven,
a fading one suspects means they don't find it,
when one has lived a long time alone.
 
5
 When one has lived a long time alone
and listens at morning to mourning doves
sound their kyrie eleison, or to the small thing
spiritualizing upon a twig cry, "pewit-phoebe!"
or to grasshoppers scratch their thighs' needfire
awake, or to peabody birds at midday send their
schoolboys' whistlings across the field, and at dusk,
their undamped chinks, as from marble cutters' chisels,
or at nightfall to polliwogs just rearranged into frogs
raise their ave verum corpus-listens to those
who hop or fly call down upon us the mercy
of other tongues-one hears them as inner voices,
when one has lived a long time alone.
 
10
When one has lived a long time alone,
one wants to live again among men and women,
to return to that place where one's ties with the human
broke, where the disquiet of death and now also
of history glimmers its firelight on faces,
where the gaze of the new baby meets the gaze
of the great granny, and where lovers speak,
on lips blowsy from kissing, that language
the same in each mouth, and like birds at daybreak
blether the song that is both earth's and heaven's,
until the sun rises, and they stand
in the daylight of being made one: kingdom come,
when one has lived a long time alone.
 
 
From A New Selected Poems by Galway Kinnell (Mariner Books, 2001)


Poetry for the 2018 Lenten Devotional was selected by The Rev. Bowie Snodgrass. 

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