"Tenebrae"

The story of Christ's passion — told in the poetry of sacred text and music — has the power to open our hearts at their most existential depths.

Tonight on Good Friday, Debi and I attended a beautiful "Tenebrae" service at the Carmel Mission. And so the poem "Tenebrae" by our friend Denise Levertov came back into our hearts as well.

Tenebrae

Heavy, heavy, heavy, hand and heart.
We are at war,
bitterly, bitterly at war.

And the buying and selling
buzzes at our heads, a swarm
of busy flies, a kind of innocence.

Gowns of gold sequins are fitted,
sharp-glinting. What harsh rustlings
of silver moiré there are,
to remind me of shrapnel splinters.

And weddings are held in full solemnity
not of desire but of etiquette,
the nuptial pomp of starched lace;
a grim innocence.

And picnic parties return from the beaches
burning with stored sun in the dusk;
children promised a TV show when they get home
fall asleep in the backs of a million station wagons,
sand in their hair, the sound of waves
quietly persistent at their ears.
They are not listening.

Their parents at night
dream and forget their dreams.
They wake in the dark
and make plans. Their sequin plans
glitter into tomorrow.
They buy, they sell.

They fill freezers with food.
Neon signs flash their intentions
into the years ahead.

And at their ears the sound
of the war. They are
not listening, not listening.

            — Denise Levertov, Fall 1967

Denise Levertov — "The Two Magnets"

Where broken gods, faded saints, (powerful in antique presence

as old dancers with straight backs, loftily confident,

or old men in threadbare wellcut coats) preside casually

over the venerable conversations of cypress and olive,

there intrudes, like a child interrupting, tugging at my mind,

incongruous, persistent,

the image of young salmon in round ponds at the hatchery

across an ocean and a continent, circling

with muscular swiftness — tints of green, pink, blue,

glowing mysteriously through slate gray, under trees

unknown here, whose names I forget because

they were unknown to me too when I was young.

And there on the western edge of America — home to me now,

and calling me with this image of something I love,

yet still unknown — I dream of cathedrals,

of the worn stone of human centuries.

Guarded by lions with blunted muzzles

or griffins verdant with moss, gateposts open in me

to effaced avenues.

Part of me lives under nettle-grown foundations.

Part of me wanders west and west, and has reached

the edge of the mist where salmon wait the day

when something shall lift them and give them to deeper waters.

                                       _________________

Denise Levertov. Evening Train. N.Y.: New Directions, 1992.