Sunday, February 09, 2014

Today's Sermon

I rarely include comments on these posts, but today is a rare day.  The poet Maxine Kumin has passed into ancestry.  Today's regular sermon will be followed immediately by a children's sermon.  It seems fitting.
IN THE PARK

You have forty-nine days between
death and rebirth if you're a Buddhist.
Even the smallest soul could swim
the English Channel in that time
or climb, like a ten-month-old child,
every step of the Washington Monument
to travel across, up, down, over or through
--you won't know till you get there which to do.

He laid on me for a few seconds
said Roscoe Black, who lived to tell
about his skirmish with a grizzly bear
in Glacier Park.  He laid on me not doing anything.  I could feel his heart
beating against my heart.
Never mind lie and lay, the whole world
confuses them.  For Roscoe Black you might say
all forty-nine days flew by.

I was raised on the Old Testament.
In it God talks to Moses, Noah,
Samuel, and they answer.
People confer with angels.  Certain
animals converse with humans.
It's a simple world, full of crossovers.
Heaven's an airy Somewhere, and God
has a nasty temper when provoked,
but if there's a Hell, little is made of it.
No longtailed Devil, no eternal fire,

and no choosing what to come back as. 
When the grizzly bear appears, he lies/lays down
on atheist and zealot.  In the pitch-dark
each of us waits for him in Glacier Park.

~ Maxine Kumin, 1925 - 2014
TONIGHT

Tonight the peepers are as loud as all
the grandmothers of the world's canaries, those
Petey- and Dickey-birds trilling vibratos
from their baggage-handle perches, perpetual
singing machines stoned on seeds of finches' hemp.

Tonight the peepers are a summer camp-
ful of ten-year-olds still shrilling after taps.
Winter will have us back with cold so harsh
the nose hairs freeze.  Weasels will spring the traps.
But tonight -- tonight the peepers raise the marsh.

~ Maxine Kumin, 1925 - 2014


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