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