Salaam and Greetings of Peace:
The 2009 Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred is accepting poems through December 31st. Information and submission guidelines are on the Merton Institute website HERE.
I know many of you are wonderful spiritual poets, so go to the site and enter. The judge this year will be acclaimed poet Wendell Berry.
No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that you have belonged to.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.
–Wendell Berry, (from A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997)
Ya Haqq!
Merton Poetry of the Sacred Prize 2009
November 22, 2008Salaam and Greetings of Peace:
The 2009 Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred is accepting poems through December 31st. Information and submission guidelines are on the Merton Institute website HERE.
I know many of you are wonderful spiritual poets, so go to the site and enter. The judge this year will be acclaimed poet Wendell Berry.
No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that you have belonged to.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.
–Wendell Berry, (from A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997)
Ya Haqq!