G. K. Chesterton: “Christmas Poem”

There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand,
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Rome.

For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.

Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the yule tale was begun.

A child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam;
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home;
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost — how long ago!
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky’s dome.

This world is wild as an old wife’s tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
Home shall all men come,
To an older place than Eden
And a taller town than Rome.
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all men are at home.

Taking part in the Conversation

"Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before.You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.

It is from this ‘unending conversation’ that the materials of your drama arise."


— Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941)

Strange Fragments

I discovered these lines, tucked between my copy of CS Lewis' "Letters to an American Lady." They were written, I think, a little before this time last year. From memory I'd just come out of the final CU Planning Days Meeting for the year. The late afternoon sun shone as bright as midday, and I was walking briskly to a dinner appointment with a friend.

Sylvia Plath says that "everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise" - I do believe I need some improvisation to make this work ... Perhaps some guts too!

So here's the bald unvarnished scribblings. They're a bit weird. A strange disembodiment, popping up a year later: out of context, and late in time.

What do you think?

*********

Here you sit
An elbow's distance away
I can touch your starched cotton wrists
Should I wish to reach

The sun warm our faces -
A near-perfect, halcyon day
The traffic dulls our senses
And your eyes dart
from face to face

(But never rest upon my face)

Question after question
You ask after my heart
My tongue seems to have struck rock
wedged between teeth and fear

You call me amazingly reserved
Yet I cannot fathom your face
No trace of blood nor flesh
Only chiseled holes
Where eyes, nose, mouth
And expression should be

So we have but words

Words choked by heads too hard
Words rooted in barren ground
Words that breathe dust
And endure still