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The Poiema Poetry Series
Poems are windows into worlds; windows into beauty, goodness, and truth; windows into understandings that won’t twist themselves into tidy dogmatic statements; windows into experiences. We can do more than merely peer into such windows; with a little effort we can fling open the casements, and leap over the sills into the heart of these worlds. We are also led into familiar places of hurt, confusion, and disappointment, but we arrive in the poet’s company. Poetry is a partnership between poet and reader, seeking together to gain something of value—to get at something important.
Ephesians 2:10 says, “We are God’s workmanship . . .” poiema in Greek—the thing that has been made, the masterpiece, the poem. The Poiema Poetry Series presents the work of gifted poets who take Christian faith seriously, and demonstrate in whose image we have been made through their creativity and craftsmanship.
These poets are recent participants in the ancient tradition of David, Asaph, Isaiah, and John the Revelator. The thread can be followed through the centuries—through the diverse poetic visions of Dante, Bernard of Clairvaux, Donne, Herbert, Milton, Hopkins, Eliot, R. S. Thomas, and Denise Levertov—down to the poet whose work is in your hand. With the selection of this volume you are entering this enduring tradition, and as a reader contributing to it.
—D.S. Martin
Series Editor
The Hatching of the Heart
Margo Swiss
THE HATCHING OF THE HEART
The Poiema Poetry Series
Copyright © 2015 Margo Swiss. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Cascade Books
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
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ISBN 13: 978-1-4982-0518-4
EISBN 13: 978-1-4982-0519-1
Cataloging-in-Publication data:
Margo Swiss.
The hatching of the heart / Margo Swiss.
viii + 78 p.; 23 cm
The Poiema Poetry Series
ISBN 13: 978-1-4982-0518-4
1. American Poetry—21st Century I. Title II. Series
PS3674.H535 2015
Manufactured in the USA.
To Dave and Jonathan
and
other friends and pilgrims
When our hearts are closed, we live within a shell.
To extend the egg metaphor: the shell needs to be
broken open if the life within it is to enter into full
life. What we need is the “hatching of the heart.”
And if the heart is not hatched, we die.
(Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity)
1. A Thin Place
A thin place is the place where the boundary between heaven
and earth is especially thin. It’s a place where we can sense the
divine more readily. (Celtic Tradition)
Photosynthesis
“The generative source of poetry is in silence and darkness.”
(George Whalley, The Poetic Process)
From silence
the tidal curve of nothingness
this reckoning, stone with stone, falls
on sticks, on brittle tips of things.
A frill of light spokes and spears in air.
Touched by it, the barren trunks relent
melting, blaze luminous,
fire without heat.
Shaggy bulbs conceal their carpelled selves,
abound in sips, a shivery cool,
while sun with ranging ribs
breathes its light
engendering green.
God’s Kinesis
“April is the cruellest month . . . .”
(T. S. Eliot, The Burial of the Dead)
The buds are breaking, biting themselves in sleep.
They wrestle interminably under winter scales.
It would be good to make light of pain as the buds do,
fighting for life on the inside
but it is too early for life.
It is a time of retention.
Green lives if only in the mind.
Taut in my season
there are two reasons for which I endure,
rivalrous as any green thing:
April blooms shooting through snow,
God’s kinesis leafing in air.
Seeds
“every expression of the will of God is in some sense a ‘word’ of God and therefore a ‘seed’ of new life.”
(Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation)
The hand that sows knows not
what seeds may grow, rise rife
with life, burrowing blackness
in God’s own time to root, stem
and shoot together.
Nosing clean from ground’s grave
they bear up bravely, eating earth away
denouncing dark with a blind might
in one last germinating gasp
break fast into morning light.
Living Water
(John 4.10)
Light rain—
soft, light rain rains.
Living water reigns.
Water
whether wanted
in storm
or warmed
still we are
watered
drenched
sometimes drowse
as roots
earthbound
feed, so we
night-long long
to rise
to rain
to