Notes:

Poetry is best when taken in doses of 2—read twice, preferably aloud, and then discussed with a friend.

 

Here are quotes by Flannery O’Connor (packed with a mouthful of “meaning”) that point to the heart of what we’re after when engaging a poem or a work of art.

 

Meaning is what keeps the short story from being short…not abstract meaning but experienced meaning, and the purpose of making statements about the meaning of a story is only to help you to experience that meaning more fully.

 

The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.

 

~ Flannery O’Connor

_______________________________________________________________________________

 

 

This month’s selections are from Robert Penn Warren and Lucinda Williams.  They keep with the spirit and questions of Easter and early spring.  What are the pathways of life?   How is accepting a “mortal limit” a “swing” to “restore” things like “The breath of earth? Of rock? Of rot? ...of whatever dream we clutch?”

 

The narrator of the sonnet, Mortal Limit, begins with seeing a “hawk ride updraft in the sunset over Wyoming.”  The narrator of the somber and meditative Broken Butterflies speaks directly to someone, a “you.”  The “you” is apparently trapped in a self-destructive and habitual disposition of anger, with all its illusions of strength and perceptive clarity.

 

In an unflinching and graphic manner the narrator describes the condition but suspends any “judgment.”*  Instead, the narrator suggest a pathway out, a difficult path, but a path nonetheless…

 

Enjoy!

 

 

 

Mortal Limit

by Robert Penn Warren

 

I saw the hawk ride updraft in the sunset over Wyoming.

It rose from coniferous darkness, past gray jags

Of mercilessness, past whiteness, into the gloaming

Of dream-spectral light above the last purity of snow-snags.

 

There—west—were the Tetons. Snow-peaks would soon be

In dark profile to break constellations. Beyond what height

Hangs now the black speck? Beyond what range will gold eyes see

New ranges rise to mark a last scrawl of light?

 

Or, having tasted that atmosphere's thinness, does it

Hang motionless in dying vision before

It knows it will accept the mortal limit,

And swing into the great circular downwardness that will restore

 

The breath of earth? Of rock? Of rot? Of other such

Items, and the darkness of whatever dream we clutch?

 

 

 

 

Broken Butterflies

by Lucinda Williams

 

You wear your anger well and stand

For all the world to see

A heavy cloak and one gloved hand

And no humility

 

You stand inside the garden

And feast on black cherries

And swallow the manna from Heaven

And spit out the seeds

 

You spread your anger on sharp-edged knives

Cut my skin and make it bleed

Like Pilate in his self righteousness

You're a traitor and a thief

 

And choking on your unplanned words

Coughing up your lies

Tumbling from your mouth

A flurry of broken butterflies

 

Broken butterflies

They rest their wings snapped in two

On their way to certain death

Their colors gold an' blue

 

But the blood that flows I cannot hide

The blood that covers me

Nourishes the butterflies

And they are healed and are set free

 

I wish you had what Ruth possessed

But then I don't expect that of you

Grace and honor and faithfulness

And the love that you refuse

 

Will you ever learn to just forgive?

Will you open your beautiful eyes?

And bleed the way Christ did

And fix the broken butterflies

 

____________________________________

 

 

Footnote:

 

*It is interesting to think about this “suspension of judgment.”  It hearkens to an ancient Greek term and idea termed epoche.  Here it is displayed in mature form, especially with respect to moral judgment.  It is a “maturity” that requires experience and a tuning of the heart (love and emotions) with the perceptive powers of the mind (including the imagination).  The narrator of Broken Butterflies perceives the hold of habitual destructive anger and its dynamic links to false perception and to false speech.  The narrator displays deep moral perception and discernment but no “judgment”—no sense of a damning categorization, no sense of judging from a superior moral condition.  There is compassion, insight, and hope.   The tension of the “suspended judgment” doesn’t swing to a sentimental gush of emotion for the angry person, and blur perception of what is truly eating at his insides as well as blur the pathway out.  Nor does the tension swing to a position of moral superiority and judgment which also blurs perception of the person and the pathway out.  (As we know, this mature form of judgment is echoed—and demanded—in the New Testament.)