A Poem Worth Reading

The pulpit has not generally been the friend of poetry. After all, Helen Steiner Rice rounds off the three-point alliteration of sermonic certainty so well, while real poems tend toward an uncomfortable ambiguity. (So do real sermons but that’s a topic for another day.)

This topic is on my mind because the current issue of The Christian Century contains a wonderful offering by Christian Wiman entitled, “Small Prayer in a Hard Wind.” It hit me so powerfully that I felt compelled to share it here.

As through a long-abandoned half-standing house
Only someone lost could find,

Which, with its paneless windows and sagging crossbeams,
Its hundred crevices in which a hundred creatures hoard and nest,

Seems both ghost of the life that happened there
And living spirit of this wasted place,

Wind seeks and sings every wound in the wood
That is open enough to receive it,

Shatter me God into my thousand sounds . . .

It’s wonderful, isn’t it? Notice the gospel allusions hidden by their use with opposite connotations - “lostness” in the first couplet, and the pun on “paneless/painless” juxtaposed to the “CROSSbeams” in the second. And in the third set (don’t miss the number!)we get both “ghost” and “spirit,” similar terms applied to the same agent (the wind, another reference to the third member of the Trinity) but the first time referring to the dead and the second to the living. Then the lovely alliterations (yes, that device does have its legitimate place) of “Living SPirit of this waSted PLaCE” and “SeekS and SingS every Wound in the Wood.” And notice the “wood” once again - back to that crossbeam!

Best of all is the idea of wounds as a source of song and the prayer to be shattered into praise. How much could our relentlessly cheerful happy-clappy-sappy-crappy music and our addiction to success-oriented preaching profit from the prophetic word of a poem like this? Like the characters in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, we are forbidden to be sad or alone. Worse -the prohibition comes ostensibly in the name of Jesus, whom, we forget, is still the Man of Sorrows. As Marva Dawn asks, “If that is the only kind of worship a community has, how will the people learn to lament?” James 1.2-4, anyone?

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