monday poem #80: David Young, "Henry Vaughan" (excerpt)
As of last week's post, I'm offically on a David Young kick.
"Henry Vaughan" is the relatively short five-part poem that acts as a preface to Night Thoughts, a book-length poem set on an August night in northern Ohio during the Perseid meteor shower.
I have never read the work of Henry Vaughan (a seventeenth-century Welsh mystic poet whose work is, if I remember correctly, referenced various places in the work of Madeleine L'Engle). Re-reading this poem, which bears his name and purports to be a version of his voice, reminds me that I would like to. It's a poem about the intersections of earth and humanity and infinity, about strawberries and galaxies, about matter and what transcends it. It's a good poem to have read on a sunny-windy October day. It makes me feel hopeful.
Henry Vaughn, 5: The Weathercock
Now here is a great joke:
the idea that the earth is finite
and we are mortal clay.
The Royal Society's saying
this world is merely "matter."
Even the clay knows better than that.
This is a world where soul-shine
blows through the clouds and trees,
where spirit bubbles in springs
and beats in lonely wells.
God's bliss sings in the weeds
and shines in the paths of slugs,
the tracks that lead nowhere,
straight as the spiral that turns
like a whelk shell of the wind
spinning the weathercock over my house,
light seeding itself each night
to spiral and sprout each day.
Come to my grave in Wales.
You'll see a glistening yew
and, on an old stone wall,
you'll find a snail with a perfect shell.
You may learn that God's the light,
wind is the Holy Ghost,
and Christ's the water cycle.
Mornings, there's dew
up there on the weathercock.
The tin bird spins
and is lit by the sun.
- David Young
from Night Thoughts and Henry Vaughan
"Henry Vaughan" is the relatively short five-part poem that acts as a preface to Night Thoughts, a book-length poem set on an August night in northern Ohio during the Perseid meteor shower.
I have never read the work of Henry Vaughan (a seventeenth-century Welsh mystic poet whose work is, if I remember correctly, referenced various places in the work of Madeleine L'Engle). Re-reading this poem, which bears his name and purports to be a version of his voice, reminds me that I would like to. It's a poem about the intersections of earth and humanity and infinity, about strawberries and galaxies, about matter and what transcends it. It's a good poem to have read on a sunny-windy October day. It makes me feel hopeful.
Henry Vaughn, 5: The Weathercock
Now here is a great joke:
the idea that the earth is finite
and we are mortal clay.
The Royal Society's saying
this world is merely "matter."
Even the clay knows better than that.
This is a world where soul-shine
blows through the clouds and trees,
where spirit bubbles in springs
and beats in lonely wells.
God's bliss sings in the weeds
and shines in the paths of slugs,
the tracks that lead nowhere,
straight as the spiral that turns
like a whelk shell of the wind
spinning the weathercock over my house,
light seeding itself each night
to spiral and sprout each day.
Come to my grave in Wales.
You'll see a glistening yew
and, on an old stone wall,
you'll find a snail with a perfect shell.
You may learn that God's the light,
wind is the Holy Ghost,
and Christ's the water cycle.
Mornings, there's dew
up there on the weathercock.
The tin bird spins
and is lit by the sun.
- David Young
from Night Thoughts and Henry Vaughan