Following the Light at St. Patrick’s

Stained glass at St. Patrick’s in Dublin

Following the Light at St. Patrick’s

Good Friday and not a prayer on me. 
I’d been reading about loneliness,
not because I am, but because light falls hard 
	on an Irish town, the starved sparks 
	after rubbing belief on belief. 
We never saw the crypts due to ceremony, still,
the Liffey let out its benediction to anyone listening —
the way we all build along water thinking
	we’re the ones who lead. 

I heard of the pope's passing the same 
	day we discovered a planet with life, 
		probably. 
This close to Easter we chase the rolling stone.
Parade in the streets I could hear but not see. 

---

This poem is a bit of an amalgamation of the last week I spent in Ireland. After spending some time in Dublin, Galway, and Belfast during Easter Week, I was struck by the country's rich and troubled religious history. It’s a country with such a decorated literary tradition and deep sense of mystery that it’s hard not to witness it in conversation, in the countryside, on the rugged coast.

We may have discovered a planet with life. What is science if not a rolling away of the stone… one version of Schrödinger’s cat.

Art This Week:

• I just read North Woods, which was great. An interesting polyphonic take on settling in the northeast.

• While in Ireland, I picked up a collection of Seamus Heaney’s Oxford Lectures and a selection of poems of Louis MacNeice, which I’ve been enjoying.

• This field recording album by Joshua Bonnetta is a stunning, auditory portrait of a pine tree through the seasons.

I’m on the board of the Friends of Seattle Public Library, and this year’s “Seattle Reads” selection is a collection of nature poetry curated by Ada Limon. I wrote a short blurb for our

newsletter about the power of nature poetry, and thought I’d include it this week. I’ve been thinking a lot about “why poetry” this month, and am hoping to put out some thoughts on the subject soon.

As a child, a fallen branch could fill hours of my time. All it took was a bit of imagination to turn a downed, dead limb into a sword, a fort, a cane—or frankly, anything. A few days ago, I realized it had been a while since I picked up a stick. That instinct to bridge the gap between myself and my surroundings had faded—and I wanted it back. So, one morning after a gusty Seattle spring night, I went for a walk and plucked one from a neighbor’s yard. I felt the bark and the knot, the smooth and the splinter. I twirled it like a baton… until I realized I can’t twirl a baton. Then, upon picking it back up, I wondered where the stick came from, where it wanted to go next. This act of curiosity, relationship, and imbuing the mundane with meaning is the spirit of poetry.

There’s a long lineage of poets who write with nature as their muse. From classics like Wordsworth and Whitman to more contemporary voices like Mary Oliver and Ada Limón, the gift of nature-inspired poetry is that it empowers us to remember that we, too, are nature and that the boundaries we erect between ourselves and the other are traversable with attention and intention.

A poem is capable of making the mundane grand and the grand bearable. At its best, it’s a return to that constant music of childhood—awe around every bend. In times like these, when attention is something we must fight to cherish, picking up a stick, walking in the woods, talking to a crow, and making meaning alongside a poem are antidotes to division and disconnection.