AND THAT IS WHERE THE JOY CAME IN

I thought I would share this lovely poem by Christian Wiman, that seems to be about the divine poetry that inhabits the ordinary, perhaps, or the joy that glimmers, even in the darkest times, or the explosion of God in things, I don’t know, but this poem seems to be a joyful glimmering all of its own. Love Susie x

From a Window

 

Incurable and unbelieving

in any truth but the truth of grieving,

I saw a tree inside a tree

rise kaleidoscopically

as if the leaves had livelier ghosts.

I pressed my face as close

to the pane as I could get

to watch that fitful, fluent spirit

that seemed a single being undefined

or countless beings of one mind

haul its strange cohesion

beyond the limits of my vision

over the house heavenwards.

Of course I knew those leaves were birds.

Of course that old tree stood

exactly as it had and would

(but why should it seem fuller now?)

and though a man's mind might endow

even a tree with some excess

of life to which a man seems witness,

that life is not the life of men.

And that is where the joy came in.

Christian Wiman