Poem posted on Christmas Day

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The Old And The New Masters

About suffering, about adoration, the old masters
Disagree. When someone suffers, no one else eats
Or walks or opens the window--no one breathes
As the sufferers watch the sufferer.
In St. Sebastian Mourned by St. Irene
The flame of one torch is the only light.
All the eyes except the maidservant's (she weeps
And covers them with a cloth) are fixed on the shaft
Set in his chest like a column; St. Irene's
Hands are spread in the gesture of the Madonna,
Revealing, accepting, what she does not understand.
Her hands say: "Lo! Behold!"
Beside her a monk's hooded head is bowed, his hands
Are put together in the work of mourning.
It is as if they were still looking at the lance
Piercing the side of Christ, nailed on his cross.
The same nails pierce all their hands and feet, the same
Thin blood, mixed with water, trickles from their sides.
The taste of vinegar is on every tongue
That gasps, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?"
They watch, they are, the one thing in the world.

So, earlier, everything is pointed
In van der Goes' Nativity, toward the naked
Shining baby, like the needle of a compass.
The different orders and sizes of the world:
The angels like Little People, perched in the rafters
Or hovering in mid-air like hummingbirds;
The shepherds, so big and crude, so plainly adoring;
The medium-sized donor, his little family,
And their big patron saints; the Virgin who kneels
Before her child in worship; the Magi out in the hills
With their camels--they ask directions, and have pointed out
By a man kneeling, the true way; the ox
And the donkey, two heads in the manger
So much greater than a human head, who also adore;
Even the offerings, a sheaf of wheat,
A jar and a glass of flowers, are absolutely still
In natural concentration, as they take their part
In the salvation of the natural world.
The time of the world concentrates
On this one instant: far off in the rocks
You can see Mary and Joseph and their donkey
Coming to Bethlehem; on the grassy hillside
Where their flocks are grazing, the shepherds gesticulate
In wonder at the star; and so many hundreds
Of years in the future, the donor, his wife,
And their children are kneeling, looking: everything
That was or will be in the world is fixed
On its small, helpless, human center.

After a while the masters show the crucifixion
In one corner of the canvas: the men come to see
What is important, see that it is not important.
The new masters paint a subject as they please,
And Veronese is prosecuted by the Inquisition
For the dogs playing at the feet of Christ,
The earth is a planet among galaxies.
Later Christ disappears, the dogs disappear: in abstract
Understanding, without adoration, the last master puts
Colors on canvas, a picture of the universe
In which a bright spot somewhere in the corner
Is the small radioactive planet men called Earth.

Randall Jarrell

Are you a poet?
No one else would know Randall Jarrell like this.

Never mind. Just remembered you are the renga person.

you must be a poet. how about something you've written?

I don't really know Randall Jarrell at all. I merely went to a searchable database of poems at http://www.poemhunter.com/ and looked for Madonna. Then mined my way thru them until I found this gem, which I really liked and seemed to express what is going on with the consumerization of the Holy Days.

As for being a poet, I am merely another unpublished dilettante. Other than a haiku contest I submit to once a month (usually finishing in the lowest or next to lowest ranks),I was writing and critiquing at one forum for a while but hit a block with the one I will add at the end of this. I got all hung up in the lists thing as being very crucial to the poem, but the critiques were running pretty heavily for sort of skipping over them. Then I discovered Asperger's and have been tripping on that for a while, but it did put that last poem in perspective a bit - I was writing as an Aspie, and they were reading it as neurotypicals. Which would account for what to me was a major stumbling block.

I think it would be more appropriate to post an original poem in the forum designated for that, but it is relatively inactive. I had sort of considered posting this there, but will shamelessly accept your invite and do it here instead. I still classify this as unfinished:

Moth Eaten Life

The last breaths of an unbloggable
week were being drawn.
Watched the DVDed first season
of the Fox series “24” in three days;
painted something to watch it dry.

Mired in malaise,
trying to fit square words
into round sentences,
my eye was caught
by movement on the floor.

A moth with one and a half wings
crawled into the halo of my desk light.
Scooped up and placed on the porch,
the yellow angular stripes
of its black wings were memorable.

Looking online for an identification key,
I was bewildered by unlearned jargon
and over ten thousand known species
in America north of Mexico;
fourteen hundred in North Dakota alone.

Then a search of “moth” and “West Virginia”
found Bob Patterson’s life
list of five hundred plus photographs
with improvised English names.
A quick scan and a few guesses later

I saw my moth,
both wings whole, enpixelized.
Apantesis phalerata, The Banded Tiger Moth.
I returned to the porch, where nothing
remained but a memory.

Wow.
That's great!
And, as you say, very ASC.
That makes me wonder about Pablo Neruda, who wrote long lists of odes to things, and could capture details of mudane objects (like flour) that no one else realized. Now that I think about it, besides his wife, he was pretty obsessed with flour. Hmmmm.
I wonder if there is a way to revive the poetry section. I submitted some poems early on and gave up when there was no response.
There is an arts section, but I felt like there would be a limited audience for poetry. In fact, even I don't go there.

I am a little torn about poetry and WP. On the one hand, the idea of one stop surfing makes the web experience more efficient, but on the other, there are 100s of sites dedicated to poetry.

Then the issue of showcasing versus critiquing comes in, and even NTs can get tweaky about being critiqued, but personally I find being critiqued an essential part of growth. Perhaps because I missed college and don't have a systematic basis to build on.

There is an Arts, Writing, Music,Crafts (sic) forum here, so no need to really make something new. Does seem tho that the emphasis there, intended or not, is fan's appreciating based rather than original works.

Just sometimes I feel that to express something I feel the best way is a poem by someone else who , IMHO, is grappling with the same or a similar experience. Judging by the lack of response to this thread, I do seem to be, as I mostly always have been in most situations, out of sync with the general mood. In this case, the mood of General Discussions, which seems to relish idle chatter.

You are right that there is a lot of idle chatter, but there are those of us who do both. So, for example, I appreciated the sentiment of both poems, but I do more than my share of idle chatter. I have not posted in the arts section for the reason you cited. That was the idea behind my thinking of starting another thread. I may have lost my touch though. It was long ago and far away that I got my degree in writing arts.
Starting a thread for the purpose of having one's poetry critiqued might be a little dangerous. I could see egos getting out of control.
On the other hand, it might be worth starting to see if people will be decent.

Let it lay, I think. WP is what it is.