Poem For The Week
The poems or meditations chosen week by week are used in our services of worship, often as the call to worship, or in our prayers.
Illumination, a meditation by Alan Norstrom
I live not for the fickle fate of fame,
In hopes that history will preserve my name,
But, rather, day by day, aim to enjoy
Each fleeting moment like a shiny toy.
An emblem of my blithe philosophy
Lies here at hand, this fading verse you see,
Which blossomed in the joyful light of dawn
Yet will from this night’s memory be gone.
What’s left’s an echo of that former bliss,
No subject for a close analysis,
A shadow merely from a brighter light
That brought me briefly to a keener sight.
To find illumination every day
Transcends my hope that any verse will stay.
Alan Nordstrom's Blog – June, 2008)
I will give you my treasures I kept
for a long time.
I will give you a petal
that falls from a rose.
I will give you the first golden leaf
that falls in autumn.
I will give you the sunken diamond
that shines more than the sun.
I will give you my last treasure,
the seashell that echoes like the ocean.
(Source unknown
Meditation by Buddha
“Know all things to be like this:
A mirage, a cloud castle
A dream, an apparition,
Without essence but with qualities that can be seen;
Know all things to be like this:
As the moon in a bright sky,
In some clear lake reflected,
Though to that lake the moon has never moved;
Know all things to be like this:
As an echo that derives,
From music, sounds and weeping,
Yet in that echo is no melody;
Know all things to be like this:
Nothing is as it appears.”
Excerpt from "Transcendental Etude", Adrienne Rich
No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history
or music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down in the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
---And in fact we can’t live like that: we take on everything at once before we’ve even begun
to read or mark time, we’re forced to begin in the midst of the hardest movement,
the one already sounding as we are born.
at most we’re allowed a few months
of simply listening to the simple line
of a woman’s voice singing a child
against her heart. Everything else is too soon,
too sudden, the wrenching-apart, that woman’s heartbeat
heard ever after from a distance,
the loss of that ground-note echoing
whenever we are happy, or in despair.
The Dream of a Common Language: Poems, 1974 – 1977. Published by Norton, 1978