"Firmament" -- A Poem

Firmament—Psalm 57

A ladybug scratches across the page.

A lamb scampers after the ewe.

And we toil along the plane—

               Folding it into stairs and stories

               And thrusting toward the sky.

A turn of the book and the ladybug clings.

The lamb suckles quietly

               While his dam crops the grass,

               Dung dropping down to renew it.

And we push up towers and rockets.

Dear ladybug slips from the tilting leaf,

               Unshells her wings,

               And lifts away.

Lamb and mother bed down by a stream.

And we brood on rooftops, calling into the void.

We and the ladybug, we and the lamb

Dwell on the surface, die into the earth,

Leap up briefly or fly up as ash.

But one day we wake—

To see from above the LORD leaning down,

Unfolding the firmament to draw us up.

Graves will open, lambs lie with lions,

And we—with new eyes and arms and hearts—

Lift into fullness and glory foursquare.

©2015, Cindy Marsch

An Easter Poem

Discerning the Lord

Ash Wednesday I try,
Walking up for my smudge,
To sense You in the rite--
Sooty crumbles skittering down my nose.

Lenten day by Lenten day
I squint my eyes to see,
In mundane March,
The moments of penitent piety.

Good Friday I shut myself in,
Poring over the story,
Calling up devotion,
Cross-legged on the bed with the Word.

Good Friday noon I find a place
Where still ‘til three
The faithful gather—
Remembering those dark hours.

Have I conjured emotion,
Struck up sadness,
Practiced the presence
Until I feel what I know?

Easter morning I shiver in the dark
With the few faithful,
In this cemetery somewhere,
To re-enact the rising.

But all for naught.
Dust, surrender,
Solitude, sleepiness—
All these are but negations.

While You,
Who fill all in all,
Walk lively among us,
Pour riches down our throats.

You shine, break forth,
Uplift, surround,
Overflow, abide—
Bursting our wineskins in forceful joy.

And suddenly the ashes fly upward,
A gust of real life—
Privations and vigils
Swept up in Your dance.

©2014, Cindy Marsch

A Silly Poem

George Grant posted on Facebook this evening a quote by G.K. Chesterton:  "The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."

Well, I'm up for a challenge, even after being away for a long time!  This is what I posted in reply to G.G.'s post:

A Cheesy Poem

I once buttered up a young miss
By saying her skin was like swiss.
I meant it was silky with cream--
"Holes" was all to her it could seem.
I tried and I tried to do better,
And I likened her hair to a cheddar.
"Greasy" was all that she knew,
So she left me bereft and so bleu.
No! Her hair was as lovely as she,
Not stinky and gooey like brie.
So now I'm a miserable fella,
Sitting here with my nice mozzarella.
Stumble and sputter and wheeze--
You just can't po-et about cheese!

--Cindy Marsch, 2013

Great Moments in Teaching

I'm so glad this teacher, Michelle Kerr, writing on the blog of Larry Cuban on June 27, 2012, shared her exhilarating hour in the classroom, and I'm glad Rod Dreher let us know about it!

"The kids carried the conversational load on that poem for ten minutes."

     --"The Miracle and the Moment"          

I love it when that happens!

She goes on to describe how what happened didn't really fit her lesson plans, that she was supervised that day and knew she'd be missing many of the stated objectives.  But something important happened there.

If you teach, I hope you have the joy of many such moments, and if you learn, I hope you are part of a miracle such as Ms. Kerr describes.  Aren't our best memories of our educations from moments like these?

The Scrabble Poet

Here's a great game idea. But it's more than a game -- it's an art form.

Use the tiles from a Scrabble game to create a poem.  Mike Keith, in "Scrabble Tile Poem," did several stanzas of iambic pentameter, each using all 100 tiles.  Now THAT is a challenge!

Can you think of other ways to play with these tiles?

Thanks to Abraham Piper's 22 Words for this piece.

A Poem

I present this poem in honor of Lynn's Ceilidh, and I've now used this term twice in less than two weeks!

Untitled

In Spring the Earth bends and melts toward the South,
Gathering the orb of sunrise in her left hand,
Then passing it along her breast, warming herself,
Until she lays it gently among the bare trees at dusk
And basks in the rosy glow chilled blue at the edge.

The days warm as she lifts her orb-passing hands higher and higher,
'Til over her head she brandishes fire,
Stretched to utmost peak,
Dazzling the fat green grown full all about her.

Her midsummer glory she cannot sustain,
But slowly limits the extent of her reach.
Day by dog day,
The sun's heat parches,
The dusty summer wearies.

Then, arms outstretched, she relinquishes her hold:
Drawn down toward heavy harvest,
The sun's blazes graze the trees.

Spent with the year, she lets go her hands,
And the dawn orb and dusk roll down to her feet.

Still, she waits, spent, chill,
Almost dead with the year.
But a freshet stirs, and calls her to listen.
And again she bends down, melting toward the South.

© Cindy Marsch
13 March 2007

The Theme of Death in British Literature

In commemoration of final exams at Grove City College this week, and in honor of my eldest, finishing her freshman year there, I want to present her opening paragraph from a take-home exam question for a British literature course. Abby is tracing the theme of death through these poems, beginning with "Ozymandias," as you will see hinted at in this nice paragraph.

Way to go, Abs! :-)

Death is a great leveler: It takes a brilliant theologian and a trucker and lays them gently side by side in a quiet cemetery. It tenderly pries a man’s grand artifices of arrogance and conceit from his cold fingers, steals his monuments to himself from him, and shifts them together deep in the sands of a desert. In the end, no matter how hard a man tries to leave lasting mementoes of his existence for future generations, death takes him, the only man who had a personal interest in his affairs.

Christina Rossetti Comparison

In an essay on Christina Rossetti's two poems "A Birthday" and "A Better Resurrection," my student Abigail M. (not to be confused with my daughter Abigail M. who also writes nicely) does some beautiful things. This is her penultimate paragraph, and a great example of a comparison that makes a point. The last phrase really hangs there in our contemplation...

Together these poems present a picture. The heart of a woman leaps up at the return of her lover. But the crowning experience is that of a soul rising from its ashes – a soul saved. However, while Rossetti places her faith in Jesus, in his death and resurrection, she also looks forward to his return. "A Birthday" could easily follow "A Better Resurrection" and become analogous to the return of Christ to his bride, the church – an event calling for all the splendor and celebration Rossetti can imagine. Or perhaps "A Birthday" does come before "A Better Resurrection". Perhaps Rossetti expresses, through this ordering, her ultimate faith and security in Jesus. Men may fail. Many a lover does not return. But Jesus died, rose, lives, and will return. He has, in life, already suffered, and as Rossetti suffers in life, as she feels loneliness, numbness, sickness of soul, she looks to the man who suffered in her place, and she choose[s] to suffer for him, clinging to his name.