The day started with a flurry of gulls
and a single cry, as if I had spoken
and out of the deep cave where my tongue lies
birds were scattering in an open sky.
I went to the rail and watched them rise
over the grey clouds as if the sky were a sea
and the sea was cold now, full of shapes
and the horse-tails of winter.
And I spoke, involuntary
out of a delighted mouth
the old, strange word
I want to write about faith,
about the way the moon rises
over cold snow, night after night,
faithful even as it fades from fullness,
slowly becoming that last curving and impossible
slither of light before the final darkness.
But I have no faith myself
I refuse it the smallest entry.
Let this then, my small poem,
like a new moon, slender and barely open,
be the first prayer that opens me to faith.
It would perhaps be more appropriate to feature a photo of the new moon , but the point, I believe, has to do with constancy of faith, even as the moon runs through its cycles, so ANY cycle ought to do.
My apologies to David Whyte for incorrect line indentations — I guess I have more research to do on line spacing in wordpress.
NOTE: deanna7trees at “eclectic meanderings” connected me to Nancy’s blog “pomegrante trail“, where interestingly Nancy links last night’s moon with this very same poem of David Whyte’s!
Naming today’s jpg files for purposes of posting them here, I used the words “close” and “full” to indicate cropping. These files — “Heart Close” (above) and “Heart Full” (below) — put me to wonder, What is it to have another’s Heart Close? Or even, one’s own Heart Close? And, what is it to have a Full Heart?
Here is the “Heart Full” — although in this case, it is not quite the entire quilt. In this Heart Series of quilts, all of which feature a single heart perched on top of a busy mosaic, I have always been working with the notion that the fullness of our experiences add up to a kind of perfection. And that this perfection normally eludes us, but in fact, is always there. As a designer, it is easy to know that the dark-hued swatches of fabric are as responsible for the overall design (and dare I say, beauty?), as the lighter patches… As a human being, it is less easy to know that those experiences which wounded us the most, are just as responsible for the overall design (and dare I say, perfection?) of our lives as the sunnier experiences.
As David Whyte states in his poem “The Faces at Braga”, “If only we knew/as the carver knew, how the flaws/in the wood led his searching chisel to the very core,/we would smile too/and not need faces immobilized/by fear and the weight of things undone.” (From “Where Many Rivers Meet”).
This smaller quilt includes the word “Darkness”
and, in the lower right corner, “SONG”. These are not contradictions.
How does one become, again to quote David Whyte’s poem, “wedded to our essence”?
such that the details transpiring in our tiny houses, do not impede the fullness of our hearts?
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