Gethsemane Psalm

Gethsemane Psalm

After they ate the Seder meal, whose order is very long,

they sang the closing psalm, and walked together

until they came to the grove.

Jesus prayed for them and still wanted to talk

to his students, his friends.

The rhododendrons closed their petals;

the blood red poppies in the fields beyond

had faded at twilight.

Jasmine, thyme, cedar, and chamomile scented

the dark air of Gethsemane.

The adolescent boys, who’d eaten and drunk a lot,

were exhausted with the hours, bearing

the history of the Jewish people,

and they slept beneath the canopy of olives.

The cyclamen stood sentry beside their black curls,

            like birds bowing their heads, balancing

            on one leg. “Stay awake with me

            and pray,” their Rabbi said.

Even loyal Peter, who blurted out his every thought,

was drooling on his pine needle pillow.

In sorrow until death, Jesus was human and afraid,

            wanted comfort and company to endure

            the torture Pilate ordered for the tens of thousands

            who dared rebel and love the poor.

“I am the way and the truth and the life,” he said,

yet he anguished: no praise for my deeds.

I’ll go to the trash heap of skulls,

like the other insurgents and thieves.

“Stay awake,” he whispered to their slumbering forms

            sleeping off their feast of flesh and blood,

            though he knew—as He knows all—that to wake

and see him fully human and fully God was more

than could be borne by these beloved children.

--Aliki Barnstone, from her book of poems, Dwelling, the Sheep Meadow Press, 2016

Note: “Stay awake...” Matthew 25:15. “I am the way…” John 14:6.  Golgatha “means the place of the skull,” Matthew 27:33.

"A Little More Mindful," a poem for Palm Sunday, Mary, and Athena

Downtown churches celebrate Palm Sunday, corner of 9th
and Broadway, Columbia, MO, 2015. Photo by Aliki Barnstone 

A Little More Mindful

—busy yourself with your daily duties, your loom, your distaff…

for war is man's matter…

—Iliad, Book VI

If I could be a little more mindful,

groom my dogs’ fur, remember

to shelve my books, shut the closet

and cabinet doors, hide away

my mess of clothes and dishes,

and graciously address every annoyance

(or worse than annoyance), perhaps

my sandals would glide up marble steps

and I’d find myself idle,

holding my peace, my desperate

thoughts left to themselves

at the bottom of the hill, while I turnover

in my palm some stones that hold

the spirits of those who do not cry out

praise for a king riding a donkey,

clothed in garments his mother wove,

her design covering his flesh from birth

until he hugged his shroud

on a road strewn with rags and palms

and wept over the city:

                         “If only you knew

on this day those things creating peace.”

Centuries before his word, their spirits dwell

in rubble, for countless wars

knock stone from stone.

They perished so long ago, their wanderings

and homes are the work

of archeology. Their pots are dust

the Athenian shopkeepers sweep away

each morning, along with the art

of their looms: the saffron

and hyacinth yarns spun for the owl,

chariot and wingéd horses

on Athena’s raiment, the story-cloths

on which the Fates dance and lament,

and teach child-bearers

             to weave defiance in a double purple web,

their textile and text incomprehensible to men.

Soldiers cannot divide the seamless robe

passed from mother to daughter,

mystery in a single thread.

--by Aliki Barnstone, forthcoming in New Letters 

and in her book, Dwelling, forthcoming with the Sheep Meadow Press, 2016

Athena holding a helmet and a spear, with an owl. 

Attic red-figure lekythos. 

between circa 490 and circa 480 BCE. 

Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

NOTE: “A Little More Mindful”: The biblical accounts of Palm Sunday are found in Matthew 21:1-11, Mark 11:1-11, Luke 19:28-44, and John 12:12-19. Luke 19:42 Jesus says, “If only you knew on this day those things creating peace.” (The translation is Willis Barnstone’s.) Jesus’s seamless robe appears in John 19:23. In some traditions, the Virgin Mary wove Jesus’s seamless robe, and he wore it his whole life; symbolically, Mary clothed Jesus in flesh. For more on Athena and story-cloths see Evy Johanne Hǻland, “Athena’s Peplos: Weaving as a Core Female Activity in Ancient and Modern Greece,” Cosmos: The journal of the Traditional Cosmology Society 20, 2006: 155-182.

"Windows on the Past" by Aliki Barnstone in honor of All Saints' Day

Winter, with Child, Red Wing, MN: Red Dragonfly Press, 2015.

Windows on the Past

I must have written these lines on a gray autumn day,

knowing the way darkness falls, as the expression goes,

like a shade drawn across the window too early

one day, and earlier the next, steadily dimming

the illumined clouds that released angels in summer,

whose wingspans grew too wide and whose spirits

became the fog gathering in the churchyard I saw

through the window. I’d stand against the wall          

just to keep standing, feeling worse than melancholy.

I wrote, “a sugar maple is inflamed with its own color,

with expansive yellow passion” —the desire

of a younger woman in a sad marriage

I’d rather not remember. When music on the radio

was beautiful, I thought, “none of this is new,”

not even a flute painting in my mind’s eye:

Chagall’s swooping brushstroke encircling the lovers

in a protected, unbroken globe, a huge green bird

perched above, or Matisse’s dancers, hands clasped,

circling fast, each one reaching for the other, leaning

into the momentum of their shared joy,

or the tender hands of mother and child portrayed

so often. “None of this new,” nor is the prayer,

“let none of these be harmed.” If only such human-

made marvels could save us, be our mirrors,

the promise of the saints, as the holy icons are

our windows opening to heaven and a new earth.

I count the years to recall—that was which war

or which eve of war? “If the air is still and a leaf drops

through an unmoving tree, it’s because it’s tired and it’s time.”

What a bleak parable, I must have penned numb, too weary

to “lay aside every weight,” as St. Paul tells his fellow Jews,

and “run with patience the race that is set before us.”

Why is the question, “when will I find peace?”

fixed on the self, not on beyond? I hold my head,

heavy as the world in my hands, and mutter words, futile,

I suppose, against the murderous judgments of leaders

who have their own words based on scripture,

and who swear—so help me, God—just as I do,

and hope to join our voices with “so great

a cloud of witnesses” as encompasses us all.

 

 --Aliki Barnstone, from Winter, with Child

http://reddragonflypress.org/books.html#!/WINTER-WITH-CHILD-by-Aliki-Barnstone/p/48144070/category=12175283

"Purple Crocuses," a Poem

PURPLE CROCUSES

Seduced by El Niño’s eastern balm, they bloom early.

One morning they appear, sudden like shining wet paint

splashed across the newly green lawn.

They’ve naturalized, their opulent purples

each year more abundant with drunken bees

buzzing between six pointed petals.

Purple crocuses with shocking orange centers

were here before I stuck my shovel in this dirt,

perhaps before the old widow, Elvira Lockwood,

who dug here before me and left a wind chime

for her ghost to breathe against

while the red-throated house finches warble,

who, a neighbor woman told me, loved birds and flowers

and planted the climbing rose of pale pink and milk

that never bloomed for us until our daughter’s birth.

Even as the hands touch wood, say this house is mine—

the barn, the fence, the rose trellis my love built

for the warm-petalled Joseph’s coat to climb,

the dirt under my feet—these purple crocuses

spread under the fence to share themselves with neighbors,

unownable fleeting musical notes for the eye to hear.

@Aliki Barnstone