Celebration and Love

As the Hart Panteth After the Water Brooks, So Panteth My Soul

[The words of this sonnet are printed below.]

This sonnet is dedicated to: my dear boyhood friend, Bob McPhee; my cousin and companion in countless hours in the fields and woods of his farm, Duncan Kinder; and my friend and colleague the Rev. Dr. Michael Caldwell. They each have been with me on the journeys the poem describes.

Many people have found great comfort out in gardens, parks, fields or woods during this pandemic.  Wild or semi-wild nature has always been a source of solace and spiritual connection for me, a place of playfulness and creative inspiration as well as work.  Now I long for it and need my daily immersions in it more than ever.

The title of the poem is taken from the first line of Psalm 42 in the beautiful King James Version.  I have laid the poem out as free verse, but it is a conventional, law-abiding sonnet if you track the feet and rhymes.  I hear it and feel it as free verse, with the rhythms below the surface like cricket sound or a stream flowing on the edge of consciousness.

As the Hart Panteth After the Water Brooks,
So Panteth My Soul
Psalm 42

A boy escapes
a hot Ohio field,
the gate, high arched white oaks;
cool ferns, the floor.
He feels shade change him,
heat and glare-hurts healed,
as if he had passed
through a magic door.
He hears the soothing sound
of falling stream.
It draws him in,
it draws forth his own songs.
Wonder and play unfold,
a waking dream,
yet true, and safe,
a place where he belongs.

A man escapes to woods
from fields of stress
and though he makes no dam
of stream-dug stone
nor warpaints face with bloodroot,
still no less
does he feel healed, safe, true,
this place his own.
Deer pant for cooling streams,
so sings the Psalm.
His heart is always
longing for this calm.

copyright 2020 Thomas Cary Kinder

The Flesh Made Word

[The words of this sonnet are printed below.]

At the end of the excellent TED Talk below Ibram X. Kendi says what Lin Manuel Miranda says at the end of his emotional sonnet responding to the Orlando mass shooting (also below): love is what is going to change and save this world, love is what must rule the ethics and practical policies and politics of our world if we are to survive.

The “revolution of values” that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesus said we need is a revolution of love, and the Dalai Lama’s “revolution of compassion” is the kind of love they meant.

This poem is about the way the revolution begins.  It starts in the heart with a particular love of neighbor as our own self, an intimate oneness, whether with a person or pet or place or community or form of God, and then it overflows into the world.

EB White wrote at the start of World War II, “Who is there big enough to love the whole planet?  We must find such people for the next society.”

We must make that next society now, but a compassionate oneness with every person, creature and corner of the planet can happen only if our love is grounded in the part of the world that is within and around us.  It begins in the flesh.

In the Gospel of John it says that the Word was made flesh. Through the alchemy of love our flesh is made a life-changing, world transforming word.

The Flesh Made Word

Come hold me close and let us both be still
while all the world around us falls apart.
Come kneel beside the spring we share and fill
with evening breeze the cup that is our heart.
Come let us form one small and holy thing,
a summer garden, winter fire, walled tight,
a home where, while it storms outside, we sing
and cook and touch, we meditate and write.
Come, let our falls and false walls heal and then
go—two made one—to take all we have found
within this blesséd Edenistic den
and let earth hear again, through us, the sound,
the voice of love’s creative, cosmic word
reversing death wherever it is heard.

copyright 2020 Thomas Cary Kinder

Light Muscle Building

[The text of this sonnet is printed below.]

“The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”  Martin Luther King Jr. from his 1968 essay “A Testament of Hope” as quoted in “How Do We Change America?” by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in The New Yorker.

Today we could add environmental destruction and its health effects and injustice to King’s list of flaws, as well as the undermining of democracy by rightwing super-wealthy individuals and mega-corporations and the politicians they support who share their autocratic ideology.

Mahatma Gandhi’s work remains the greatest model for “radical reconstruction of society.” Many people know of his marches, fasts and acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, but far fewer know that this Obstructive Program was just a small part of his overall movement, and it would not have succeeded without two other far greater programs. Continue reading →

Lilacs

[The words of this sonnet are printed below.]

How I Lost an Argument and Won This Sonnet (and a few others)

Writing and the spiritual life both were important parts of my childhood, and when I awoke to adolescent consciousness I found them at the core of my being, where they have remained.

I emerged as a fledgling poet and spiritual and social activist on October 15th, 1969, at age 14.  It was War Moratorium Day and I was visiting my brother, George, who lived on the edge of the Harvard campus.  The night before he had introduced me to the poetry of William Carlos Williams and the Imagists.  That day we watched the coverage on the news of our generation rising up with the power of a mass movement.  That evening I wrote my first free verse poem, an imagistic social and spiritual manifesto.  I was swept up and rode that wave a long time.  I still am riding it, although in different forms.

We were strident those days, and part of my stridency was a harsh judgment of formal poetry.  I was a free verse fundamentalist as a Creative Writing Program major at Princeton, arguing with my thesis adviser, Carlos Baker, in a precept, insisting that the Imagists were far superior to Emily Dickinson.

I argued even more vehemently with my mother, who was my first literary and spiritual teacher.  She would throw Frost at me: “Writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net.”  She told me more than once that if I wanted to become a good poet I should write five thousand sonnets.

I would scoff and throw up my hands and walk out of the room—that beautiful room that she created by finding second hand furniture and fixing it up and filling the surfaces with vases of flowers cut from her yard.  How I would love to be able to walk back into that room today, how I long for that beautiful, ordered calm, that cool serenity now with our world falling apart.

How I would love to report to her that she won the argument, and I have indeed written my five thousand sonnets, but she died before I had written my first. Continue reading →

Reflections On War and the Military: “Training Flights” and “Hanging Between Two Dying Ways”

I share two sonnets below, “Training Flights” and “Hanging Between Two Dying Ways: A Lament,” both from my collection “Sonnets for the Struggle for Peace, Justice and the Care of the Creation.”  I am publishing them here to follow up a facebook exchange that you can see below about the recent use of F-35 war jets to honor medical workers treating coronavirus patients.  This is a long introduction, so if you are more interested in the sonnets, skip to the end of this page.

Many reasonable people disagree with my feelings about war planes overhead and about militarism and modern warfare.  Some of those people are in my family and among my friends, and I respect them.  Their reasonableness and wonderfulness as people does not change my position, but it makes me want to explain myself. Continue reading →

And Here

[The words of this sonnet are printed below.]

We need to change our society’s way of seeing and thinking about the entire creation, we need to evolve a new collective way of seeing and thinking about ourselves and our place in the order of things, in order to change our society’s destructive way of life.

Ancient spiritual traditions envisioned the cosmos being born out of divine love.  They teach us that we are to love the creation as its creator does.  Love of neighbor, love of the creator and the creation—these have been handed down to us by our wisest elders as the highest natural laws.  The collective, eternal flow of life is a stream of self-giving love, and for those who live in that Tao, individual life is a stream of many such acts over a lifespan, serving our time and place.

The goal is to create the conditions conducive to abundant life for all, for the common good—a sustainable harmony and an equitable and just society.

This is within our reach.  We have made stunning advances in understanding and technology, and humanity seems on the brink of making the needed developmental shift to the mature perspective of the wisest spiritual teachers.  We could evolve finally to have the heart and mind of Christ and the Buddha and Gandhi and King, and the wisdom and passion of Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai and Mother Theresa and Dorothy Day.  We see millions of people now moving toward that vision of compassion and oneness.  We have the tools we need.  We can do this.  And we must do this, for life on earth to survive.

The beautiful, joyous truth is that we each can help make this transformation happen by opening our own heart and mind to be transformed, and by living our own lives in our own place more lovingly.  We can do this right now, right here…

And Here

And here is where I heard the hermit sing.
And here is where the ermine popped through snow.
And here is where the golden eagle’s wing
sent benediction to the land below.
And here is where I stood to sing of songs
and presences and blessings we pass through.
I do not know to whom this land belongs
except by this one law I know is true:
The spirit of creation makes a claim,
love’s birth, love’s joy, love’s struggle to survive.
We live to serve and celebrate love’s aim.
There is no other cause to be alive.
And here we sing our thanks as loves appear.
And here we make our place by loving here.

copyright 2020 Thomas Cary Kinder

Love of Light Song

Love of Light Song

O Light, how much you love the mighty trees,
those massive trunks of maple, ash and oak
that cast up vast translucent canopies
beneath which long past generations woke
and we wake still, we lower, lesser things,
we dwellers in their filtered sun and shade.
We hear the wind or thrush high up that sings
the praise of greatness that your light has made.
But we sing, too, our humble, quiet songs
of ray pierced pools that make the rock moss shimmer,
of stained glass ferns that soar above the throngs
of praising beetle, worm and water skimmer.
You love us all, you give each all your gifts,
you bless the slightest song the humblest lifts.