At St. martin’s

a collection of Lenten prayers, poetry and reflections

Vespers & Verses: Week One Theme: Friendship A Prayer Humans are meant to be in relationship. Jesus called the disciples friends. Judas‟s betrayal, Peters denial, the abandonment of James and John - they stung so much because they were not just disciples, they were friends. Their bond was strong, so their failures were even more painful. We feel bad after the end of a relationship because friendships are so wonderful - such an important part of our lives. We have all experienced the joy of friendships, the ending of relationships, betrayals, deaths, denials, divorces, family fights that never get fixed. I invite you to pray with me about the relationships in our lives: The relationships that we are thankful for, and the relationships that have been broken, are still strained, or have faded away. The relationships that have been hurt by others and the ones that we have hurt – with our anger, our hard hearts, and our carelessness.

We are frail and broken people O, God. We pray for healing and forgiveness.

i carry your heart with me by e. e. cummings

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in

my heart) i am never without it (anywhere i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling) i fear

no fate (for you are my fate,my sweet) i want no world (for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

A Poisoned Tree by William Blake I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow. And I watered it in fears Night and morning with my tears, And I sunned it with smiles And with soft deceitful wiles. And it grew both day and night, Till it bore an apple bright, And my foe beheld it shine, And he knew that it was mine - And into my garden stole When the night had veiled the pole; In the morning, glad, I see My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

Widows by Louise Gluck

My mother's playing cards with my aunt,

Spite and Malice, the family pastime, the game my grandmother taught all her daughters.

Midsummer: too hot to go out.

Today, my aunt's ahead; she's getting the good cards. My mother's dragging, having trouble with her concentration.

She can't get used to her own bed this summer. She had no trouble last summer,

getting used to the floor. She learned to sleep there to be near my father.

He was dying; he got a special bed.

My aunt doesn't give an inch, doesn't make allowance for my mother's weariness.

It's how they were raised: you show respect by fighting. To let up insults the opponent.

Each player has one pile to the left, five cards in the hand.

It's good to stay inside on days like this, to stay where it's cool.

And this is better than other games, better than solitaire.

My grandmother thought ahead; she prepared her daughters. They have cards; they have each other.

They don't need any more companionship.

All afternoon the game goes on but the sun doesn't move. It just keeps beating down, turning the grass yellow.

That's how it must seem to my mother. And then, suddenly, something is over.

My aunt's been at it longer; maybe that's why she's playing better.

Her cards evaporate: that's what you want, that's the object: in the end, the one who has nothing wins.

Yesterday by W. S. Merwin My friend says I was not a good son you understand I say yes I understand he says I did not go to see my parents very often you know and I say yes I know even when I was living in the same city he says maybe I would go there once a month or maybe even less I say oh yes he says the last time I went to see my father I say the last time I saw my father he says the last time I saw my father he was asking me about my life how I was making out and he went into the next room to get something to give me oh I say feeling again the cold of my father's hand the last time he says and my father turned in the doorway and saw me look at my wristwatch and he said you know I would like you to stay and talk with me oh yes I say but if you are busy he said I don't want you to feel that you have to just because I'm here I say nothing he says my father said maybe you have important work you are doing or maybe you should be seeing somebody I don't want to keep you I look out the window my friend is older than I am he says and I told my father it was so and I got up and left him then you know though there was nowhere I had to go and nothing I had to do

Vespers & Verses: Week Two Theme: Expedience

A Prayer

Jesus‟ death was ordered by the religious institutions and carried out by the government. The angry crowds

called for his crucifixion. Jesus, like so many people, was a victim of the expedience of the system. The grinding wheels of institutions can trap people in their machinery, and the institutions that were created to

serve God and people often end up working against them. We see this in many things. In the maze of a recorded answering service that separates us from a live, human voice. In the machine of war that leaves soldiers and civilians in its wake. In insurance companies that care more about profits than people, and in

economies that forget about their poorest members.

These machines are made of people, and they reflect our faults and shortcomings. We interact with them daily. They have the power to change our lives without even knowing what they‟ve done.

We invite you to pray about the expedience with which the world often works. Pray for the institutions that help and those that ignore the humanity in us. Pray for the ones that have abused us, and the ones that we

benefit from but have forgotten or hurt others.

We are frail and broken people, O God. We pray for healing and forgiveness.

Government by Carl Sandburg THE Government -- I heard about the Government and I went out to find it. I said I would look closely at it when I saw it. Then I saw a policeman dragging a drunken man to the callaboose. It was the Government in action. I saw a ward alderman slip into an office one morning and talk with a judge. Later in the day the judge dismissed a case against a pickpocket who was a live ward worker for the alderman. Again I saw this was the Government, doing things. I saw militiamen level their rifles at a crowd of workingmen who were trying to get other workingmen to stay away from a shop where there was a strike on. Government in action. Everywhere I saw that Government is a thing made of men, that Government has blood and bones, it is many mouths whispering into many ears, sending telegrams, aiming rifles, writing orders, saying "yes" and "no." Government dies as the men who form it die and are laid away in their graves and the new Government that comes after is human, made of heartbeats of blood, ambitions, lusts, and money running through it all, money paid and money taken, and money covered up and spoken of with hushed voices. A Government is just as secret and mysterious and sensitive as any human sinner carrying a load of germs, traditions and corpuscles handed down from fathers and mothers away back.

The Colonel by Carolyn Forche

What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His

daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol

on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television

was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his

hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for

calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed

the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk of how difficult it had become to govern.

The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the

table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to

bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There

is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a

water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone,

tell your people they can drop dead. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor

caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

To The Pay Toilet by Marge Piercy You strop my anger, especially when I find you in restaurant or bar and pay for the same liquid, coming and going. In bus depots and airports and turnpike plazas some woman is dragging in with three kids hung off her shrieking their simple urgency like gulls. She's supposed to pay for each of them and the privilege of not dirtying the corporate floor. Sometimes a woman in a uniform's on duty black or whatever the prevailing bottom is getting thirty cents an hour to make sure no woman sneaks her full bladder under a door. Most blatantly you shout that waste of resources for the greatest good of the smallest number where twenty pay toilets line up glinty clean and at the end of the row one free toilet oozes from under its crooked door, while a row of weary women carrying packages and babies wait and wait and wait to do what only the dead find unnecessary.

These Yet To Be United States by Maya Angelou

Tremors of your network cause kings to disappear.

Your open mouth in anger makes nations bow in fear.

Your bombs can change the seasons, obliterate the spring.

What more do you long for? Why are you suffering?

You control the human lives

in Rome and Timbuktu. Lonely nomads wandering

owe Telstar to you.

Seas shift at your bidding, your mushrooms fill the sky.

Why are you unhappy? Why do your children cry? They kneel alone in terror

with dread in every glance. Their nights are threatened daily

by a grim inheritance.

You dwell in whitened castles with deep and poisoned moats

and cannot hear the curses which fill your children's throats.

Vespers & Verses: Week Three Theme: Suffering

A Prayer

When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon.

At three o'clock, Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Jesus suffered. Jesus wept. Jesus begged, and Jesus was abandoned. He was wounded, felt pain and endured

embarrassment. Jesus suffered.

Suffering is something that Jesus shared with the world. Suffering is part of every human life. We suffer in illness, with loss and grief. Pain is inflicted by others, and pain is inflicted by ourselves. We suffer when

others suffer.

We invite you to pray about suffering – the suffering we have in our lives, and the suffering felt by others. There is suffering that lasts a moment, and there is suffering that lasts a lifetime. We invite you to pray about

those times that we have watched others suffer and could do nothing about it – and the times that we suffered alone and no one could console us.

We are frail and broken people, O God. We pray for healing and forgiveness.

Dolor by Theodore Roethke

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils,

Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight, All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,

Desolation in immaculate public places, Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,

The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher, Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma, Endless duplication of lives and objects.

And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions, Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,

Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium, Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,

Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces.

Coffee and Dolls by April Bernard

It was a storefront for a small-time numbers runner, pretending to be some sort of grocery. Coffeemakers and Bustello cans populated the shelves, sparsely. Who was fooled. The boxes bleached in the sun, the old guys sat inside on summer lawn chairs, watching tv. The applause from the talk shows and game shows washed out the propped-open door like distant rain. It closed for a few months. The slick sedan disappeared. One spring day, it reopened, this time a sign decorated the window: COFFEE & DOLLS. Yarn-haired, gingham-dressed floppy dolls lolled among the coffee cans. A mastiff puppy, the size and shape of a tipped-over fire hydrant, guarded as the sedan and the old guys returned. I don't know about you, but I've been looking for a narrative in which suffering makes sense. I mean, the high wail of the woman holding her dead child, the wail that filled the street. I mean the sudden fatal blooms on golden skin. I mean the crack deaths, I mean the ice-cream truck that cruised the alphabets and sold crack to the same deedle-dee-dee tune as fudgesicles. I mean the raw scabs of the beaten mastiff, and many other things.

What the Doctor Said by Raymond Carver

He said it doesn't look good

he said it looks bad in fact real bad he said I counted thirty-two of them on one lung before

I quit counting them I said I'm glad I wouldn't want to know about any more being there than that

he said are you a religious man do you kneel down in forest groves and let yourself ask for help

when you come to a waterfall mist blowing against your face and arms

do you stop and ask for understanding at those moments I said not yet but I intend to start today

he said I'm real sorry he said I wish I had some other kind of news to give you

I said Amen and he said something else I didn't catch and not knowing what else to do

and not wanting him to have to repeat it and me to have to fully digest it

I just looked at him for a minute and he looked back it was then

I jumped up and shook hands with this man who'd just given me something no one else on earth had ever given me I may have even thanked him habit being so strong

The Snowman by Barton Sutter

This is a poem for Tom.

This is poem for Tom Blair. This is poem for him

And for all the men on the edge Of their beds in their underwear,

Wondering what they‟re doing there. This is poem for them.

For all of the good providers.

The place of the poem is Chicago. The time of the poem is the great snow Of nineteen hundred and seventy-nine.

In ‟79 it snowed so that People fought over parking spots.

Arms were twisted, headlights busted. And all because of the snow.

Not that I blame the snow. No, the snow was only the weather.

I‟m talking about something else altogether.

Thomas Blair drove a plow, And because of the snow in „79

He worked a lot of overtime. Not that I blame the snow.

But because of the snow The work was there,

And there was the wife and kid, A regular blizzard of debts, and so

The food of the poem is coffee, Coffee and cigarettes.

Tom went to work, And he worked and worked, with little time off, And he worked and worked, And one day, Tom, He went berserk. He forgot all about the snow And started plowing up cars, And some had people in them, And some of the people died. Can you see the blue lights of his truck? The cherry tops of the cops? He wrecked forty cars with the plow Before they go him stopped, and when they could hear What the screaming said, You know what the screaming said? “I hate my job! I want to see my kid! I hate my stupid job!” So that‟s the poem. What do you think? What do you think it‟s all about? It‟s not about the snow So much as . . . I‟ll tell you What it‟s about. This is poem for Tom. This is poem for Tom Blair. This is poem for him And for all of the men on the edge Of their beds in their underwear, Wondering what they‟re doing there. This is a poem for them. For all of the good providers.