This week, a poem from section two of Away.
Following the anger in section one, the poems in section two come from surrender. There came a time when I could no longer carry my anger, and I needed to let it go. In the midst of asking countless theological questions, I was also asking questions about my anger: How do I learn from it and use it for good? What is true in it, and what is egocentric and reactionary? How do I let go of it without letting go of what it taught me about how to stand in unquiet solidarity with people who are suffering, with creation that is suffering?
Throughout this process, I continued to ask the big questions as well. What lasts? What matters? Where is God? What is God?
Though they remain in many ways unanswerable, leaning into my questions eventually led me closer to love, to a God who suffers with us, who is in this crazy reality with us. That’s what the poem “Looking” is about.
Looking
The night after a snow,
I can see clear to the woods
from the window
a grayscale impression
of all the usual things –
the barn, the maple, the fence row.
Not sharp, but vivid.
Essence more visible than edges
in the numinous glow.
I look for the deer
whose prints I find
in the mornings.
I peer into
the east pasture.
They are there.
Three willowy forms
nosing through the snow
under the oak trees.
Contours and curves
dark in the white night,
they bend and beam
the turquoise light.
A kind of music plays,
like a river running.
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