Poem: "The Way the Soul Arcs"

Delphiniums courtesy of Pixabay

This poem was first published in living with what remains:

THE WAY THE SOUL ARCS

              Judith Deem Dupree

A bee has come

to harvest my delphiniums --

circling them,

leaving a halo only I can see.

The blooms are potted

on the sun-streaked deck --

in clay flared slightly

by the hands that held it to the wheel.

Its shape reminds me

of the way my hands cup, rising,

opening in praise

when Grace is nearly palpable.

Blossoms spill in tangled glory

down the earthen jar,

too much glory to define as *blue*.

They break with logic,

with its need for category --

the prompting

to explain, to clarify, compare...

Like the way the soul arcs around

our shaped theology,

searching for that unseen radius

where Glory spills --

as indefinable, as prescient,

as honeyed as the aura of delphinium.

Facing Toward the Light: An Excerpt from Sky Mesa Journal

Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

Excerpt from Sky Mesa Journal by Judith Deem Dupree. Copyright 2016, published by Wipf and Stock. Copies may be purchased from Wipf and Stock and from Amazon.  

LOCAL NOTE: An Author Talk featuring Judith discussing the genesis and publication of Sky Mesa Journal is being hosted by the Alpine Library (1752 Alpine Blvd.) this week on Thursday, October 20 from 6:00-8:00 PM. Judith will have books for sale and will be happy to sign copies. Please come support a local San Diego author and her work.   

It was not much past dawn when I slipped out the door and faced the great iron gate out back. In the slant of first light it resembled somewhat the “gates of hell”―heavy and formidable. Ah, but beyond lay Paradise! In lieu of unlocking and unwinding the heavy chain and shoving against its grudging “joints,” I climbed over the old monster. I always do―depositing whatever baggage I tote over on the other side.

Today I toted only a weight of weariness. The “world was too much with me.”

I am not an up-with-the-roosters person. I felt quite uneasy leaving my comfort zone so early―regardless of the discomfort that routed me. Testing my legs and blood sugar and ignoring the grind of an empty belly seemed like a bad answer to a bad question. Or quest. The gnaw of guts was only a mimic of the churn of thought that woke me.

But I was brought up short by the exclamatory. Earth-life stretched around me, hummed and chirped, exhaled its varied aromatic breath, each its trace of pneuma. The land was filled with freshness. I breathed vastly, enfolded in the small celebration before me.

The early light is a peach-hued wash against the umber earth. An incredible palette! This is the morning’s work within me, this facing toward the light. Too often I see the world darkly, see only the umber without the wash of ruddy gold. There are times, even in this become-sacred place, when melancholy overwhelms any sense of the mystery of nature, a denial of the spare and eloquent mastery of God. Scales creep over the spiritual retina I peer through―opaque, filmy, all the drab distortions that we know.

Probably it is much like the blindness that the Lord peeled away from Saul-become-Paul. I recognize this more often now, this clumsy and yes, futile shield―my fascia, a veneer against the callousness before me . . . and within me.

And against grief. There is a sorrow, a Welt-Schmertz, weeping up through me, a deeper grief than I can carry. Either to live without grieving or grieve without recourse bequeaths fatalism, begets tragedy. It is a betrayal of the faith we first consent to.

It is balance I need, and a robust vision. I am just beginning to face this truth: I must neither fear the darkness, nor accept it, nor shrug it off. I cannot fight the battle for earth-life unless I have fought the battle for my vision.

As a frail and sometimes fatuous human being, I balk at death’s increasingly harsh preliminaries―at the way it visits us at every turn, the ways it comes ripping through humanity, Grim Reaper that it is. It is my own creeping entropy I battle, and lose within the entropy of a world I gather up and mourn. It is attending a funeral endlessly repeated, a cortege of the helpless and the homeless.

And the heartless. That eternal death . . . 

Life today is often seen as something of a wedge between two vast intangibles―our very entity caught in a grind between the beginning and end, those eternal mysteries of being.

Nature denies such hopelessness. Every new morning, new spring, each rebirth from fire or flood or wind proclaims life’s frailty and strength, unwraps the earth from its grave-cloth . . . .

Celebrates its endurance, its stubborn resurrection. 

Some Likeness Unforeseen: A Poem

This poem was published in living with what remains, a collection of poetry published in 2004 that is available on Amazon here: living with what remains.

Some Likeness Unforeseen

Nature listens--hearing  ever that cell-voice
which breathes its silent syllables
through each tiny universe,

and studies it covertly there, this hidden marrow--
studies its likeness and its endless variance,
with thought of molecule, of phylum
and of husk and fur, of stamen, semen, zygote--
thought coaxing life to rest, to build
and build again some likeness unforeseen.

The elm lifts its solemn face upward,
begging light, breaking light into prisms
with its slanted arms. Does it remember,
cell-bound, how the earth first broke its life
to shimmering replication
from a million broken faces of the sun?

And far beyond these shaggy fields
(these honest homilies of faith), the cougar crouches
low against a rock-bound peak
and paces where his tendons flex to tell him so;

and on beyond, at the stubborn jaw
of this great crouch of land--upon its lip,
between its jagged teeth,
the seaweed swirls and is spit back endlessly;
fish explore it with their great, globed eyes.

All these are likeness, and each, each,
is alone within that whisper which bequeaths them.

Beneath and above it all,
the earth swirls on its great, gray bath of mist,
on, on, and on--containing all--cell-bound
in the splendor and purity of light.

And you and I,
dependents in a breathless universe,
defendants of the heart's internal entropy,
of the way time sucks our cells dry
and draws the circling marrow from our bones . . .

We lay our weary head against our wary soul,
its hidden universe, and beg for rest there--
hearing but a syllable beyond our own,
finding there a Likeness long foreseen.


~Judith Deem Dupree

Finding and Losing The American Soul-A Tribute and a Tribulation

Recently, during a personal writing retreat in Colorado, I was involved in a group book reviews event. (To each his/her own choice.)  I presented a book that I am currently inching through fervently, riveted by the thesis, knowing it is a pivotal theme for any resolution of our national crisis. And yes, we are in a crisis.

The book: The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders by Jacob Needleman.  It has garnered increasing acceptance and acclaim since publication in 2002. At that pivotal moment, barely post-9/11, he saw, with extraordinary clarity,  the state of our disunion. Wiser minds than mine have churned through Needleman's tight and elastic  (both, paradoxically) explorations and summations, and said "YES!"

His theme? It could be multi-labeled, for all his applications and intimations, but Needleman basically assert s that our nation has  lost an incalculable gift of national and international particularity in a world that needed—and heeded—our unique and God-given/driven view of nationhood . . . and that we can only recover it by heading back to the creation of this great primal experiment in governing. For its primal wisdom. By revisiting our founding fathers—applying to the pursuit a soul-set we've never really attained before—we  identify who and what each had become as a person at that historical "moment."

We finally comprehend what they agonized over individually, thrashed out together and, finally, contracted, that created "the greatest nation in history." We are invited into a startling frame of reference on both character-building and nation-building. We are offered a "dynamic" that is historic in its integrity and diametrically alien to our present fragmenting life as a national and world entity.

Also intricately woven into Needleman's chain of premises—as equally indispensable, and perhaps even more stirring—is the compelling life witness of Abraham Lincoln. A breakthrough concept of our evolving history would be impoverished, incomplete, without this remarkable man at the helm during a pivot point in history.  In a meditation on this president, the author describes, with a depth that can only be called visionary, the impact upon him of the photos of Lincoln. And because Abe is the "continuity" that was requisite to our survival as a nation, he is shouldered firmly into the pantheon of heretofore  idealized non-idols who conceived the original "American dream."

The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders is a masterpiece of historical weaving, unraveling, reweaving. Ergo, my gratitude for a landing place for my constant, gnawing concern for this nation, and the stunning relief I experienced in finding a rationale for this concern. Here I found a practical and prophetic analysis of what we have lost . . . and what we must admit to—and grieve for. And yearn to discern in order to become once again, to survive and thrive as a people.