Day 20-Some Prayer

Some Prayer
(an iconoclast longs for several friends)

"The icon is a song of triumph, and a revelation, and an enduring monument to the victory of the saints and the disgrace of the demons." --John of Damascus, On Icons, 2, 2

Someone tonight believe
 in a healing song
 in the hands and their oils
  on the flesh of our brother.

Some hand, tonight, burn
 not as fire
 not as flame
  but as a fierce salve on the skin.

Summon out the venom
 of the cells,
 of the body in the world
  that decays of our own weight.

Some God open, oh icon of yourself,
 open, as a wound, take into yourself 
  my brother at his merest. 
 
Summon him, or raise him, 
 or return him to us clean 
                as a new stone, as a verse in Revelation if you can.

Levertov and ikonography

Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell

Down through the tomb's inward arch
He has shouldered out into Limbo
to gather them, dazed, from dreamless slumber:
the merciful dead, the prophets,
the innocents just His own age and those
unnumbered others waiting here
unaware, in an endless void He is ending
now, stooping to tug at their hands,
to pull them from their sarcophagi,
dazzled, almost unwilling. Didmas,
neighbor in death, Golgotha dust
still streaked on the dried sweat of his body
no one had washed and anointed, is here,
for sequence is not known in Limbo;
the promise, given from cross to cross
at noon, arches beyond sunset and dawn.
All these He will swiftly lead
to the Paradise road: they are safe.
That done, there must take place that struggle
no human presumes to picture:
living, dying, descending to rescue the just
from shadow, were lesser travails
than this: to break
through earth and stone of the faithless world
back to the cold sepulchre, tearstained
stifling shroud; to break from them
back into breath and heartbeat, and walk
the world again, closed into days and weeks again,
wounds of His anguish open, and Spirit
streaming through every cell of flesh
so that if mortal sight could bear
to perceive it, it would be seen
His mortal flesh was lit from within, now,
and aching for home. He must return,
first, in Divine patience, and know
hunger again, and give
to humble friends the joy
of giving Him food--fish and a honeycomb.

--Denise Levertov

Two by Stephen Frech

Poet Stephen Frech has written an entire collection of poems based on the life and paintings of Rembrandt. A number of these could be seen as, in part, ekphrastic midrash, a faithful, fervent troubling of scripture for meaning and insight through the further refraction/commentary of Rembrandt's many biblical paintings. Here are two.


Christ at Emmaus—Stephen Frech

One asked the stranger to divide the bread
and the flame wavered as if a breeze crept in.
Pausing for a moment, the inn’s day done,
he listened to the distant kitchen clatter,
a woman bent over a basin
scrubbing the day’s grime from new pots—
tomorrow, who can discern yesterday’s from today’s?

So the stranger took the loaf in both hands,
measured with his thumbs the seam
where he intended to break it,
showed it to one many saying, “This is for you.”
As the crust tore, the cup tipped
and spilled its wine that ran the length
and seeped through the cracks of the table’s planks.

Knowing him at last, am I the one froze in surprise
or the other, fallen to my knees, my eyes cast down
seeing some far field I’ve never lost sight of
and that, if only I’d set out, a day’s walking
would have brought to me.




The Adoration of The Shepherds—Stephen Frech

They entered slowly like birds wanting bread.
Unlike any other seed they know,
it stirs a hunger a day of feeding won’t sate,
a longing so desperate that, skittish, with quick eyes
watchful for the other fist,
they risk feeding from your hand.

The smell of the barn fouled the nostrils:
the day had been long and hot,
the animals labored hard.
Crushed bindweed dried on the hooves of cattle;
the horse’s collar hung on the wall,
its padded leather still damp and rip with horse brine.
And hay, just on the far side of fermenting,
spike the air and kept the cows dreamy and docile.

An old man carries a dim lamp into the light of the barn
and the flame is merely flame now—a busy sliver.
It hardly casts shadows of its own;
its light barely reaches the rotting loft boards.

He hadn’t expected this, not at all:
a new mother, so young and at ease
with the baby as only young mothers can be,
generous with all the strangers craning to take a look.
She doesn’t know—how could she?
The shadow on her breast is only of her hand.


from If Not for These Wrinkles of Darkness (White Pine Press, 2001

Rembrandt: Midrash and Icon

See the power point on Rembrandt: Midrash and Icon from Tuesday's class. Also, Ryan Pendell's blog. Much more to come.

Conference Ekphrasis 2

II. Our Lady of Tenderness

Christ Child with your arms around your mother
what have you done for us

to take in our hands bona fide conception with flesh?
Saint Catherine of Siena said

You drew us out of your holy mind
like a flower

and she was illiterate most of her life, her prayers written down
for her, and it is in prayer we have

two hands up, like your mother’s, every finger the final petal,
not touching you but meaning to touch,

either buttressing or balancing stacks of tokens, glasses dark with wine,
our limitations and that hot need

to love. Did you think I wouldn’t see it is you holding her,
not her holding you? For

she has already the unfortunate-that-which-is-to-come in her eyes,
drooped with sorrow, our careful human sap.

You, as though you will breath into her—if only to adumbrate
a Russian artist’s rendering of hope—

you, a child who couldn’t have been only a child, your thick neck
twists to kiss her, and she looks

vigilantly at us. Ocher walls, chipped and ancient,
they are not your home. She knows

this, she tells me, obstinate as I am, slowly broken down
in the bones with a weight

known only by leaping belief, she asks with eyes like grapes
not what has he done

but what hasn’t he? O Little Panacea, suffering up under
your mother’s brow, keep your hand

cupped close, bless her name when years later the crowd
will beg for your breath, hallowed and terrible.


Susanna Childress, a section from her longer poem "After the Virgin from Vladimir" from Jagged with Love (U of Wisconsin P, 2005)