#Wiman

[aigeratedmagma]

[heavensickness]

[beguines]

Not long before her death, Anna Kamieńska wrote what I think is her best poem (available in English, at any rate), a stark, haunting, and insidiously hopeful little gem called "A Prayer That Will Be Answered." The title is worth some stress, in both senses of that word: "A Prayer That Will Be Answered." Lord let me suffer much and then die Let me walk through silence and leave nothing behind not even fear Make the world continue let the ocean kiss the sand just as before Let the grass stay green so that the frogs can hide in it so that someone can bury his face in it and sob out his love Make the day rise brightly as if there were no more pain And let my poem stand clear as a windowpane bumped by a bumblebee's head (tr. by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak) This is an uncanny poem. It gives God all power (the continuance of the world) and no power (it was going to continue anyway). It is implicitly apophatic, you might say. That is, it erases what it asserts: it is a prayer to be reconciled to a world in which prayer does not work.

Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair

[llovelymoonn]

favourite poems of january

christian wiman hard night: "the ice storm"

timothy donnelly hymn to life

randall jarrell the complete poems: "the lost world"

dana levin the living teaching

stuart dybeck brass knuckles: "the knife-sharpener's daughter"

kofi awoonor the promise of hope: new and selected poems: "lament of the silent sisters"

bruce snider ode to a dolly parton drag queen

jon pineda birthmark: "translation"

brenda shaughnessy interior with sudden joy: "dear gonglya"

franny choi hangul abecedarian

atsuro riley hutch

clark moore strikes and gutters

jenny xie eye level: "rootless"

alberto ríos the smallest muscle in the human body: "rabbits and fire"

tim seibles mosaic

anthony hecht an offering for patricia

harry matthews cool gales shall fan the glades

robert glück the word in us: lesbian and gay poetry of the next wave: "burroughs"

albert goldbarth the poem of the little house at the corner of misapprehension and marvel

george seferis collected poems (george seferis): "spring a.d."

alberto ríos a small story about the sky

sharmila voorakkara for the tattooed man

robin blaser the holy forest: collected poems of robin blaser: "the truth is laughter 10"

robert pinsky gulf music: "antique"

henri cole blackbird and wolf: "twilight"

paul violi likewise: "in praise of idleness"

ron padgett collected poems: "what are you on?"

meena alexander birthplace with buried stones: "lychees"

sara borjas decolonial self-portrait

valerie martínez absence, luminescent: "the reliquaries"

kathryn simmonds the visitations: "in the woods"

kofi

[firstfullmoon]

Christian Wiman, “The End of Prayer” [ID in ALT]

[ghooostugs]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

"Hope” by Palestinian artist, Sliman Mansour

(Guillaume Gris)

* * * *

Faith is a grace, not an achievement. And there are times in human existence when imagination as consolation is a violation of life and a desecration of grief.  Here is what I mean: 

The mind may sort it out and give it names— When a man dies he dies trying to say without slurring The abruptly decaying sounds. It is true That only flesh dies, and spirit flowers without stop For men, cows, dung, for all dead things; and it is good, yes— But an incarnation is in particular flesh And the dust that is swirled into a shape And crumbles and is swirled again had but one shape That was this man. When he is dead the grass Heals what he suffered, but he remains dead, And the few who loved him know this until they die. Galway Kinnell, “Freedom, New Hampshire” [Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair by Christian Wiman]

[albumarchives]

Dismember | Pieces (1992)

[theinwardlight]

Dietrich Bonhoeffer says that Christ is always stronger in our brother's heart than in our own, which is to say, first, that we depend on others for our faith, and second, that the love of Christ is not something you can ever hoard. Human love catalyzes the love of Christ.

Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss

[soulmaking]

[holycartoonwarrior]

Image that lives in my mind rent free 24/7

[beguines]

Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair

[demonbarberofbeepbeep]

swucy. What have I doooooone

[ma-pi-ma]

La cortesia non è mai sprecata. É il più economico dei piaceri; non costa nulla e frutta molto. Piace a chi la da ed a chi la riceve, e quindi, come la pietà, è doppiamente benedetta.

Erastus Wiman

[heartyearning]

A light store in the bowery Christian Wiman

Some love is like a light store you slip inside only to escape the rain. Something to see, it turns out: the plasma lamps, mosque and lava, the elegant icicles of the chandeliers, shapes and shades so insistently singular that rooms can't help but happen around them, lives can't help but acquire choices and chances inside. Some love is like an old owner who when a child walks in with her parents can only imagine shatterings. And some love is like that child asking with an earnest and exemplary awe, "Where do they keep the dark?"

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Illustration Cloud With Bucket István Orosz (1951) Hungarian graphic artist, illustrator, poster artist and animation filmmaker

* * * *

All my friends are finding new beliefs. This one converts to Catholicism and this one to trees. In a highly literary and hitherto religiously-indifferent Jew God whomps on like a genetic generator.

Paleo, Keto, Zone, South Beach, Bourbon. Exercise regimens so extreme she merges with machine. One man marries a woman twenty years younger and twice in one brunch uses the word verdant; another’s brick-fisted belligerence gentles into dementia, and one, after a decade of finical feints and teases like a sandpiper at the edge of the sea, decides to die.

Priesthoods and beasthoods, sombers and glees, high-styled renunciations and avocations of dirt, sobrieties, satieties, pilgrimages to the very bowels of being ...

All my friends are finding new beliefs and I am finding it harder and harder to keep track of the new gods and the new loves, and the old gods and the old loves, and the days have daggers, and the mirrors motives, and the planet’s turning faster and faster in the blackness, and my nights, and my doubts, and my friends, my beautiful, credible friends.

- Christian Wiman -

Source: Poetry (January 2020)