Occasions: Selected Poems
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About this ebook
Marilyn McEntyre
Marilyn McEntyre is the award-winning author of several books on language and faith, including Where the Eye Alights, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, Speaking Peace in a Climate of Conflict, When Poets Pray, Make a List, Word by Word, and What's in a Phrase? Pausing Where Scripture Gives You Pause, winner of the 2015 Christianity Today book award in spirituality.
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Occasions - Marilyn McEntyre
Advent on the Central Coast
Sun falls on grass
as green as April’s.
Shadows of passing clouds
barely darken the patio tiles.
Only a breeze reminds us
this is not spring, but a season
of long nights and inward turning.
The purple candle is lit. Three more
wait untouched in a fresh wreath
for Sundays to pass in solemn procession
as the season unfolds. Ancient
rituals survive among all the year’s
particulars: a sick friend needs solace,
a project is completed, a child is born.
Once again we lay aside
what has befallen and beset us
to prepare a way for what is coming.
The time is near,
we sing,
for the crowning of the year . . . .
Despite fatigue, delays, digressions,
there will be a feast.
We must make ready.
❧
River Walk, January 6
Where river laps the shore
small birds and burrowing creatures
find what they need.
An egret stands listening.
Her quiet stills us for a moment,
and we listen, too.
Home from our walk, and warm,
we reheat yesterday’s barley stew
and make tea and talk
while afternoon turns to evening.
Lights on the little tree and candles
mark the twelve days
from Christmas to Epiphany.
At the edge of a year so many begin
with unsettled hopes we gather
reasons to rejoice, having returned
from another edge, peered into a chasm
and seen how even there light
suffuses the hospital room, the face
of a nurse nearing the end of her shift,
the riparian dreamspace
where what cannot be said
may be heard. We know now
how celebration honors
survival, how a turning year marks
what has been saved and given again,
how every day we stand
at the edge of time. How if we listen
we may hear the flights of angels
whose song sustains us still.
❧
February Again
Just as the year curves into spring
and small buds break
and fill the eye with pink
I wake at dawn and know
you have long since risen
into your own quiet beginning,
tiptoeing past small sleepers
and into the still chill air
with its reminder of winter.
You came on a day like this
as morning verged into afternoon
and leftover snowdrift softened
every sound, your small cry
a heart-stopping greeting, tentative
as the spread of a fledgling’s wings.
Every year in the wide wake of Christmastide
February brings its hints of hope, and you
emerge again into what awaits you.
The season, waxing from Christmastide
to Lent, takes its appointed time