Hunting the Phoenix

(Nun by Morris Louis, 1912-1962, American Abstract
Expressionist painter)

Today we begin a month of contemplation guided by poetry. The poem below speaks to a journey of inner discovery made possible by the exploration of past experience.

According to Greek mythology, the phoenix is a wondrous bird with shining red and gold plumage. It lives for centuries until there comes a time when it breaks out into a haunting dirge, before it burns itself on a funeral pyre of spices set alight by the sun and fanned by its own wings. The phoenix then arises from the ashes, renewed, resurrected, to live again.

HUNTING THE PHOENIX

Leaf through discolored manuscripts,
make sure no words
lie thirsting, bleeding,
waiting for rescue. No:
old loves half-
articulated, moments forced
out of the stream of perception
to play “statue,”
and never released —
they had no blood to shed.
You must seek
the ashy nest itself
if you hope to find
charred feathers, smoldering flightbones,
and a twist of singing flame
rekindling.

~ Denise Levertov (1923-1977), English-born American poet

Shema

(Omega IV by Morris Louis, 1912-1962,
American Abstract Expressionist painter)

The poem below was written by Primo Levi (1919-1987), an Italian chemist, writer, and poet. His many works, especially If This Is a Man, his memoir of his year at Auschwitz, examine man’s struggles to maintain his humanity in the face of great evil.

The Hebrew title of the poem below translates into “listen” or “hear.” It is the first word of a prayer in Jewish liturgy admonishing the faithful to teach their children to love God and to obey the commandments.

The poem is in three parts. The first stanza greets the readers now living in the post-Holocaust world of comfort and peace; the second describes the terror of the death camps; and the third urges us to warn future generations of the lessons of this evil so that such evil can never again take place.

SHEMA

You who live secure
In your warm houses
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider whether this is a man,
Who labors in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.

Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.

Separation

(Delta Theta 1961 by Morris Louis, 1912-1962, American
Abstract Expressionist painter)

A simple metaphor is often sufficient to express profound grief.

SEPARATION

Your absence has gone through me
Like a thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

~ W. S. Merwin, born in 1927, American poet, essayist, and translator