I love Scott Cairns...

Here's a new poem by a guy I have come to love: Scott Cairns. Funny, I was just saying yesterday to my wife that I prefer his older poems - and now this one pops up and is just as good as the old timers. Thanks be to God. He recently spent time at this monastery: Mt. Athos in Greece.

Speculation: Along the Way
The roaring alongside he takes for granted —"Sandpiper" by Elizabeth Bishop

And when, of a given evening, say, an evening laced
with storm clouds skirting distance parsed by slanting light,

or when the thick air of an August afternoon by the late approach
of just such a storm turns suddenly thin and cool, and the familiar

roaring, for the moment made especially unmistakable
by distant thunder, may seem oddly to be answered from within

—that's how it feels, anyway—and when, of a moment, such roaring
couples as well with sudden calm—interior, exterior, it hardly matters—

in that fortunate incursion whereby the roar itself is suddenly interred,
you might startle to having had a taste of what will pass as prayer,

or a taste, at the very least, of how fraught, how laden the visible is,
even as you find a likely figure for its uncanny agency. Sure,

I'm making this up as I go, hoping—even as I go—to be finally
getting somewhere. And maybe I am. Maybe I'm taking you along.

Let's say it's so, and say we now commence.

One of the blessings of poetry - for me who came to it all well after 40 (except rock and roll) - is that it evokes feels and insights that are greater than the words, yes? It is, perhaps, no coincidence then that I married a poet? Once, when we were prowling a bookstore before we were married, I had an epiphany when I found an old volume which I now keep in my study (and use often) in which Robert Bly writes: While our European-American tradition questions and argues, and has to teach poetry to sullen students in English classes, other cultures, speaking Spanish, Russian, Arabic, to say nothing of the many tongues of Africa and the Indian subcontinent, grow up inside poems, drenched through with poetic metaphors and rhythms. As we learn to criticize, to take a poem apart, to get its meaning, they learn to listen and to recite.

By drawing this sharp contrast with other cultures, we are pointing to a defect in ours. We live in a poetically underdeveloped nation. Men blame their own lives for a deficiency in the culture. For, without the fanciful delicacy and the powerful truths that poems convey, emotions and imagination flatten out. There's a lack of spirit and vision. The loss in he heart appears as a loss of heart to take up he great cultural challenges that are part of every man's citizenship. It is in this sense hat we have come to think that working in poetry and myth with men is a therapy of the culture at its physic roots.

I could not agree more. Today, while sharing lunch with one of the Berkshire's great pianists - who has also had a career interviewing some of the spiritual giants of our era - we spoke of Huston Smith and B.B. King in the same breath - two masters of the soul who won't be with us long. But both have helped so many find poetry and beauty and hope... and when I got home, she had sent me this link which says it all. Thanks be to God for those who bring such beauty to birth.