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    Occasions: Selected Poems
    Occasions: Selected Poems
    Occasions: Selected Poems
    Ebook98 pages34 minutes

    Occasions: Selected Poems

    By Marilyn McEntyre

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    About this ebook

    These poems, written for occasions, remind us of those occasions that recur--celebrations, commemorations, rites of passage, and ordinary moments of being that linger in memory as turning points or extraordinary encounters or summonings. Tied as they are to particular times and places, readers will recognize in them echoes of their own beginnings, partings, and moments of awakening.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherResource Publications
    Release dateSep 25, 2018
    ISBN9781532652493
    Occasions: Selected Poems
    Author

    Marilyn McEntyre

     Marilyn McEntyre is the award-winning author of several books on language and faith, including Where the Eye Alights, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, Speaking Peace in a Climate of Conflict, When Poets Pray, Make a List, Word by Word, and What's in a Phrase? Pausing Where Scripture Gives You Pause, winner of the 2015 Christianity Today book award in spirituality.

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      Book preview

      Occasions - Marilyn McEntyre

      Advent on the Central Coast

      Sun falls on grass

      as green as April’s.

      Shadows of passing clouds

      barely darken the patio tiles.

      Only a breeze reminds us

      this is not spring, but a season

      of long nights and inward turning.

      The purple candle is lit. Three more

      wait untouched in a fresh wreath

      for Sundays to pass in solemn procession

      as the season unfolds. Ancient

      rituals survive among all the year’s

      particulars: a sick friend needs solace,

      a project is completed, a child is born.

      Once again we lay aside

      what has befallen and beset us

      to prepare a way for what is coming.

      The time is near, we sing,

      for the crowning of the year . . . .

      Despite fatigue, delays, digressions,

      there will be a feast.

      We must make ready.

      ❧

      River Walk, January 6

      Where river laps the shore

      small birds and burrowing creatures

      find what they need.

      An egret stands listening.

      Her quiet stills us for a moment,

      and we listen, too.

      Home from our walk, and warm,

      we reheat yesterday’s barley stew

      and make tea and talk

      while afternoon turns to evening.

      Lights on the little tree and candles

      mark the twelve days

      from Christmas to Epiphany.

      At the edge of a year so many begin

      with unsettled hopes we gather

      reasons to rejoice, having returned

      from another edge, peered into a chasm

      and seen how even there light

      suffuses the hospital room, the face

      of a nurse nearing the end of her shift,

      the riparian dreamspace

      where what cannot be said

      may be heard. We know now

      how celebration honors

      survival, how a turning year marks

      what has been saved and given again,

      how every day we stand

      at the edge of time. How if we listen

      we may hear the flights of angels

      whose song sustains us still.

      ❧

      February Again

      Just as the year curves into spring

      and small buds break

      and fill the eye with pink

      I wake at dawn and know

      you have long since risen

      into your own quiet beginning,

      tiptoeing past small sleepers

      and into the still chill air

      with its reminder of winter.

      You came on a day like this

      as morning verged into afternoon

      and leftover snowdrift softened

      every sound, your small cry

      a heart-stopping greeting, tentative

      as the spread of a fledgling’s wings.

      Every year in the wide wake of Christmastide

      February brings its hints of hope, and you

      emerge again into what awaits you.

      The season, waxing from Christmastide

      to Lent, takes its appointed time

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