imperfect paradise.

I'm taking a poetry class this semester, which has been wonderful. I don't love every poem we cover, but having poetry as part of my weekly school reading has been like medicine for my soul. It expands my mind and my faith in a way I can't explain in words. It helps me find beauty not just on the page, but in my life as it unfolds daily.

My favorite thing about this class is that we get to write our final paper/project about any theme, subject or poet we want. I had trouble trying to pick just one poet, so I've settled on a theme. The subject I am diving into is finding the beauty in what is imperfect. The poems I want to study are those that find meaning and even divinity in what is broken. I am excited to see how poets draw on theology and expand it. I'm looking forward to sharing the poems on this blog as I work on this project over the coming weeks. Here are a few lines from some of the poems I've already decided to include.

"To say it once held daisies and bluebells

Ignores, if nothing else,

Its diehard brilliance where, crashed on the floor,

The wide bowl lies that seemed to cup the sun,

Its green leaves curled, its constant blaze undone,

Spilled all its glass integrity everywhere;

Spectrums, released, will speak

of colder flowerings where cold crystal broke...

The splendid curvings of glass artifice

Informed its flawlessness

With lucid unities. Freed from these now,

Like love it triumphs through inconsequence

And builds its harmony from dissonance

And lies somehow somehow within us, broken, as though

Time were a broken bowl

And our last joy knowing it shall not heal." -James Merrill, "The Broken Bowl"

"Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one's torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.

There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds." -Wallace Stevens, "Poems of Our Climate"

"But every/ morning on the wide shore / I pass what is perfect and shining/ to look for/ the whelks, whose edges/ have rubbed so long against the world/ they have/ snapped and crumbled---/ they have almost vanished,/ with the last/ relinquishing/ of their unrepeatable energy,/ back into everything else. / When I find one/ I hold it in my hand,/ I look out over that shrinking fire,/ I shut my eyes. Not often,/ but now and again there's a moment/ when the heart cries aloud:/ yes, I am willing to/ be/ that wild/ darkness,/ that long, blue body of light." -Mary Oliver, "Whelks"

My hope is that all of us might have the eyes of poets: to find inspiration, brilliance and love in the most cracked and imperfect corners of our lives.