Slow reading of poetry is becoming a favourite way of recovering a sense of slow. Some of the most important human experiences require us to take our time, or better, to take the time it takes to listen, see, understand, appreciate, enjoy, allow ourselves to be spoken to from outside ourselves. And the time it takes isn't the time I can spare, but the time it takes for that other voice to speak. So whether that voice is Brahms' Violin Concerto, a tern diving into blue sea, the distant profile of a mountain I climbed years ago, Rublev's Icon of The Trinity above my desk, a sycamore tree aflame with autumn, food lovingly prepared and eaten in friendship, shared silence with the love of our life, or poetry – these are voices that are raoutinely obscured, obliviously silenced by the noise of undeterred preoccupations and the clatter of a life too busy to want to hear them.
Amongst those from whom I am currently re-learning the gift of slow listening, is Denise Levertov. She would have rejected the description of her work as 'Christian' poetry – rather it is the poetry of one who during her life as a poet, came to deep convictions through an inward conversion, expressed in words and ideas recognisably Christian. Not so much Christian poetry as and increasingly recognisably Christian theology giving form and tone to her way of seeing and saying the world. Here are a couple of short poems to read………slowly…..more than once…
I had grasped God's garment in the void
but my hand slipped
on the rich silk of it.
The 'everlasting arms' my sister loved to remember
must have upheld my leaden weight
from falling, even so,
for though I claw at empty air and feel
nothing, no embrace,
I have not plummetted.
The Avowal (Recalling the 300th Birthday of George Herbert, 1983)
As swimmers dare
to lie face to the sky
and water bears them,
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain
freefall, and float
into Creator Spirit's deep embrace,
knowing no effort earns
that all-suurounding grace.
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