A Poem for Holy Saturday (Revised)

A poem for Easter

I hope you have a meaningful Easter. I hope you experience the richness of the Story - the movement from darkness and death towards light and life.

Smack in the middle of all this comes Holy Saturday. I wrote a poem on Holy Saturday a few years back - here is a newly revised version.

HOLY SATURDAY

And this holy Saturday is
An elastic band, stretched taut
A kingdom held back
just one more day
kinetic
energetic
propulsion potential

The hand
calms the waves
The voice
stills the voices

Not yet,
not yet
But soon
and then ... oh, then!

You will let fly the smile of love
Zip!
To the back of the head
Snap!

But not yet

The band may yet break
The dark is still pregnant
A belly stretched taut

Soon.

Sarah Kay Reminds Me Of The Difference Poetry Can Make

Sarah Kay is a performance poet. She is also an advocate and activist who has done (like any poet worth her salt) plenty of soul searching. That journey brought her to the TED stage, in a video you can watch by clicking this image right here.

Sarah Kay is involved with Project VOICE, which "is dedicated to promoting empowerment, improving literacy, and encouraging empathy and creative collaboration in classrooms and communities around the world." 

She has collaborated on books that fuse her poems with illustrations, such as "B", which you can get from the library as soon as I'm done with it. You'll find a whole collection of her poems in "No Matter the Wreckage", but I've got that one right now, too.

A recent interview on Brain Pickings with Maria Popova includes this exchange;  

"MP: And this brings us back to the legitimacy question — if making a living isn’t the metric of success in creative work, if academic credentials aren’t it, then what is? What is your internal barometer for your own legitimacy?

SK: Oof, that’s a big question."

What is your internal barometer for your own legitimacy. Oof.

Sarah Kay writes the types of poems that gain a new flavour in the mouth of the reader. Here are a couple readings by the author to savour, as we edge ever-nearer to Poetry Month. 

Poem text and an interview with Sarah about our fear of missing out, being a working artist in today's world, and how we measure creative success: https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/03/07/sarah-kay-interview/

Part of an interview with Sarah about being a working artist in today's world and how we measure creative success, as individuals and as a culture: https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/03/07/sarah-kay-interview/

Scott Cairns Feeds My Soul

Today I received an email from Image Journal, and in that email was a link to a new poem from Scott Cairns called Lenten Complaint. 

Photo from Image Journal

Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems

By Scott Cairns

This poem reminded my how I've been stirred by the words of Scott Cairns in the past. How when Cairns reminds me that, "He shaped of every sepulcher / a womb", I resonate. How his relationship with Greek Orthodoxy, the Greek language and the Christian faith stirs a potent poetic cocktail. How his phrase 'every womb a sepulchre' How I haven't done so well with Lent this year. How I have my own complaints. How we share a broken hope.

I realized, reading that poem, that you may not know the work of Scott Cairns, and how that would be a shame.

His latest book of collected poems is called Slow Pilgrim. Whatever you are fasting from for Lent, I hope it isn't poetry. 

Read Lenten Complaint, from Issue 68 of Image Journal, here.