1 Thessalonians 5:17

"Pray unceasingly."

I wake and kneel I kneel to pray
My prayer be raised this rise of day

When day is risen rain or sun
This day be prayer thy work be done

When day is set this work is done
So may I rest come rest of sun

I raise my prayer at set of day
To wake come rise of sun to pray


© Leticia Austria 2013
First published in Time of Singing

Prompted by Emily

     A few years ago, I received a newsletter from a poetry site in which were listed several exercises a poet could try when experiencing writer's block. One of the exercises was this: take a line from a favorite poem as the opening line of your own, then use one word (or more) from that line in every succeeding line. You can use the same word, or choose different words.

     Sounded pretty simple to me. So I decided to use a line from Emily Dickinson that I love a lot. The result is this little lyric, written in heroic couplets.

Prompted by Emily

"My wars are laid away in Books—," she said.
And in the books I've written or have read,

the wars that I have witnessed or have fought
are laid with ghosts I've fled and ghosts I've sought.

I laid away my books before the wars
were fairly won, before my battle scars

were barely formed, and put them far away
from less destructive wars of Everyday.

The wars I've laid away are numberless,
but ghosts are never really laid to rest.


© Leticia Austria 2010
First published in Decanto

Notti Bianche (Sleepless Nights)

After many, many months of being very, very lazy and not sending out any poems, I got off my proverbial duff and sent a few to The Lyric, a fine publication that specializes in formal poetry. It is, in fact, the longest continuously running (93 years) journal of formal poetry in the United States. I have been published by them twice before, and am very happy that they accepted my work a third time.

 

This is the poem that appears in their Winter 2013 issue. It was originally titled "Notti Bianche," which is Italian for "sleepless nights" (literally, "white nights"). I gave it the Italian title because it is included in my as-yet-unpublished collection The Distant Belovèd, but I thought that the English title would make more sense when the poem appeared outside the collection.

 

 

 



Notti Bianche (Sleepless Nights)

When even dreams deprive me of the face
that more than common slumber is my rest,
then I will give the dark to nights of white
and paint a wakeful rest on nothingness.

I'll trace the lines—so well do I recall!—
as slowly as the swing of winter stars,
and contemplate the histories behind
each angle, curve, and slope, the rugged arcs.

But only when desire's painstaking brush
completes the blessed stillness of the eyes,
will deep content take hold and wakefulness
become a prayer, the holiest of sighs.


© Leticia Austria 2010
First published in The Lyric and winner of the 2013 Leslie Mellichamp Prize

The Bond of True Friendship

When I left "the world" to enter the cloister, my deepest sorrow was not, as one would think, leaving my family, but leaving my friends. My family, I knew, would always be there for me and I would be always in their hearts, and they would certainly visit as often as was permitted; but how many of my friendships would survive what could have been a lifelong separation? If I had remained in the cloister, taken solemn vows, it was quite possible that I would never again see any of them, unless they made the trip to Lufkin to visit, or to witness my Solemn Profession.

 

I did receive letters from some of my friends, and one of them did come for a brief visit. One, however, wrote to me far more often than the others. Oddly enough, it was a friend I hardly ever saw in person (and still see only rarely). I was so very grateful whenever my novice directress handed me an envelope scrawled with his familiar handwriting! It was during those two and a half years, enclosed in the monastery walls, that I learned how true a friend he was and is.

Forgetting

Forgetting is the thing I fear the most.
I can't forbid the fading of the day,
nor can I draw the curtains of your heart
against the void of predatory night.
The music we have shared, the scattered days,
are feeble beams of light across the sea
of separation, circumstance, and time.
That there may only be what there
has been, I won't regret. The one thing I
could never bear is that you would forget.


Assurance

"How could I forget you? Be sure of my eternal friendship,
     as I am sure of yours." ~ from a letter

There is a passacaglia in my mind
That plays its stately rhythm on those days
When faith becomes a nebulous, gray haze
And all bright hope lies languishing behind.
Its harmonies are simple, yet refined;
Its tune develops at a solemn pace;
There is comfort in its persistent bass,
A steady beat, dependable and kind.
Above all, its composer is most dear,
For it is you, who wrote it for my heart
When cloister walls had once kept me apart
From things familiar, things I held as mine.
It is my talisman against all fear
Of distance, and its thieving ally, time.


Definition of "passacaglia"
© Leticia Austria 2008, 2011

Music Monday: Bach and Winter Rain

The Pianist Recalls

I longed for silence; but instead, I found
that winter raindrops tapping on the ground
reminded me of fingers playing Bach.
And with the lissome beat of that courante,
I heard the voice of my old confidante
behind the door I had so firmly locked.

© Leticia Austria 2010
First published in The Road Not Taken: A Journal of Formal Poetry

Bach: Partita No. 2, Courante - Tatiana Nikolayeva

Golden Light

John Atkinson Grimshaw
"Golden Light"

 

 

Giuramento (Oath)

 

If autumn's graces never came again,

Its lace no longer glimmered in the lane,

Its leaves no longer wept with cooling rain—

     Still, I would love.

 

Should autumn's music sing its last refrain

And summer ever glisten on the plain,

The memory of autumn will remain—

     So, too, my love.

 

© Leticia Austria 2009
First published in Decanto



My Favorite Wildflower

     Many, many years ago—I think I must have been in middle school—I saw my first wild rain lily. It had finally rained hard one dry summer, and a couple of days after the storm I found a single white flower in our front yard, rising above the grass, straight and pristine as a ballerina en pointe. My first instinct was to pick it and put it in my room, but then I thought, it looks so right where it is. It was there for only a couple of days and I never saw another one in our yard since. I never forgot it, though, and later learned that it was a rain lily.

     Years later when I was in the monastery, I loved taking walks in the woods within the enclosure walls, and delighted in the various wildflowers that bloomed there, though I didn't know much about them. I had entered in the summer, a particularly dry one, and after the first heavy rainfall I noticed lilies had sprouted up—these, however, were not snowy white, but pale pinkish-purple, delicately striped. There was an old book in the novitiate library about Texas wildflowers, and I learned from it that this particular kind of rain lily grows in wooded areas. I also learned that the rain lily bulbs lie very deep in the ground, so deep that they sprout blooms only after a heavy enough rain breaks a long, long drought.

     Something about that fact moved me deeply. Maybe it was because I was going through so many difficulties, so many tests of patience and tolerance, during those first months as a postulant. Thinking of those flowers lying dormant for so long, patiently and confidently waiting for the rain from heaven to bring them forth from the dry earth, was a great help to me. I've loved rain lilies ever since. Now whenever I see them, standing tall and exultant after their deep sleep, I rejoice in God's sustaining grace and my belief in resurrection is renewed. We are, after all, more to God than the lilies of the field.

The Rain Lily

Beneath this crusted soil I shall await
the rain. Beneath the weight of withering roots
of weeds, I'll bide my time. It is the fate
allotted me. Inert yet resolute,

I have the shell of unremitting trust
in which to sleep, the pearl protection of
the waiting yet to rise, of those who must
depend upon the water from above

to fall and break the drought. For it must fall
someday, as surely as this ground is dry.
It is the compensation for us all.
The day will come when I shall see the sky.

["The Rain Lily" © Leticia Austria 2009. First published in The Road Not Taken: A Journal of Formal Poetry ]

Source



Drought (and I Don't Just Mean the Weather)

     It is the first of August; 2012 is two-thirds gone. And I have written exactly two new poems so far this year. Two. This, from someone who, four years ago, wrote nine poems in August alone. Not that any or all of them were gems, mind you. I relegated most of them to my "reject" file, to be picked over some day in search of an odd phrase or two that might be salvaged. But at least I was creating.

     I've been through dry spells before, but nothing like this. Not only is my muse temporarily (one hopes) paralyzed; I haven't even been motivated to send anything out to editors. I haven't sent anything out in a year. My last poem in print came out this past April -- which was only four months ago, but it feels like fourteen.

     During another dry spell about two years ago, a friend of mine who writes the odd poem between raising her children and singing in the chorus at HGO, gave me a first line prompt to get me started on a new one. This was the result:

          DROUGHT

          Upon a jagged precipice, I stand
          poised, parched, a poet's heart in hand,
          beneath me, withered brook and furrowed land.

          There was a time not long ago, the grass
          swayed, surged, an undulating mass
          that fissured where the fleeter-footed passed.

          There was a time not long ago, I stood
          poised, plied, surrounded by its good,
          behind me, siskins singing in the wood.

         © Leticia Austria 2010. First published in Decanto.

     I might just ask my friend to toss me another prompt. Who knows, it might produce a decent poem and chip me out of this sand trap onto the green, or at least the fairway. "Oh, Kelley ... !"

The Comfort of Fabrication

     Sometimes words imply a hidden meaning. Sometimes we infer one.

     All of us are guilty of inferring at one time or another. But we may infer a certain interpretation on someone's words because that is what we, subconsciously or not, want them to mean. Doing so either gives us a sense of self-vindication, or justification for blaming the other person; or perhaps we simply want something from that person which he or she can't give us for one reason or another. If the last is true, we find a sort of "fabricated comfort" in our inferral that can sustain us for a lifetime -- even if we're fully aware that it is fabricated. Denial, self-delusion, call it what you will. It's also human.

Pressed Leaves

I'll spin a hundred words from every one
you wrote and weave a blanket, many-hued,
to wrap around me with the setting sun
and let its colors permeate the truth;

or else a woolen mantle of desire,
the white desire possession cannot stain,
to draw about my shoulders when the rain
descends and I am dreaming by the fire.

I only want your words to warm my skin
as autumn folds its chilly limbs around
the earth, when fallowness has claimed its ground
of silence, and the end of life begins.                        (03/11)


[First published in Decanto]

Three Lives

Three years ago, I was inspired by Christina Rossetti's sonnet "A Triad," which conveys the effects of love on three different women: a fallen woman, a love-starved spinster, and a wife.

     A Triad by Christina Rossetti

     Three sang of love together: one with lips
          Crimson, with cheeks and bosom in a glow,
     Flushed to the yellow hair and finger-tips;
          And one there sang who soft and smooth as snow
          Bloomed like a tinted hyacinth at a show;
     And one was blue with famine after love,
          Who like a harpstring snapped rang harsh and low
     The burden of what those were singing of.
     One shamed herself in love; one temperately
          Grew gross in soulless love, a sluggish wife;
     One famished died for love. Thus two of three
          Took death for love and won him after strife;
     One droned in sweetness like a fattened bee:
          All on the threshold, yet all short of life.

I took the "triad" concept and applied it, in a poem of my own, to one woman who passes through three distinct life phases. I guess it's pretty obvious that the woman in the poem is me.

I tried to make use of symbolism, some of which is repeated (ivory, silver, dancing, robe, flesh). This was intentional, in order to give a hint before the final stanza that the three women are actually one.

     Three Lives

     There was a woman long ago
     Whose soul was buried in the snow;
     Her heart was kept inside a box
     Of ivory, locked with silver locks;
     And since her modest robe was torn,
     She used her flesh to keep her warm.
She danced until the stars grew cold and pale,
Believing dance would serve where love might fail.

     Another, disillusioned, cast
     Aside the falseness of her past,
     And laid her soul upon the breast
     Of Him Who is our final rest;
     The whiteness of the robe she wore
     Absolved the crimson scars she bore.
Her steps were silent on the ancient stone;
She held the world inside and danced alone.

     And then a third, who found a soul
     To flame her own, who found the whole
     Of Heaven in a noble love
     That raised her mind to things above;
     A love that lived unrealized
     In touch, a fleshless sacrifice.
She kept her secret in an ivory box
Until her song unlocked the silver locks.

     Three lives -- of flesh, of soul, of heart --
     Three different women stood apart;
     Yet, bound by blood and bone, each knew
     The three were one: a woman who
     Was born but once, yet lived life thrice,
     As toy of man, then bride of Christ,
And then as troubadour placed out of time,
Who eased her heart's complaint with salving rhyme.           (May 2009)


["Three Lives" was first published in The Eclectic Muse.]