life on planet earth on Poetry

Poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.

The most carefully crafted language in our culture tends to be poetry. And poetry at its finest moments subverts our best attempts at hiding from reality... The poetry of liturgy has just this power. ...

I like hanging around words, listening to what they say.

Our love of rhythm and meter, in fact, is directly “related to the beat of our hearts, the pulse of our blood, the intake and outflow of air from our lungs.

I found that keeping company with poets, men and women who care about words and are honest with them, who respect and honor their sheer overwhelming power, kept me alert—biblically alert, Jesus alert.

'"Oh! That was poetry!' said Pippin. "Do you really mean to start before the break of day?”

Pablo Picasso lived among a group of artists in Paris in the early 20th century. One evening, the celebrated American writer Gertrude Stein was hosting a group of artists at her home, which doubled as...

Depending on where you are, the earth is just waking up or is leaping forth with new life! Here is a poem and five quotes on the topic of spring. A Poem "Lines Written in Early Spring"...

A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space -- a place not just set apart but reverberant -- and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on...

In 1998, Nick Cave, an Australian rock/pop artist, was asked by the Vienna Poetry Academy to give a series of talks on the nature of song-writing. A year later he gave a slightly revised version of th...

In 1998, Nick Cave*, an Australian rock/pop artist, was asked by the Vienna Poetry Academy to give a series of talks on the nature of song-writing. A year later he gave a slightly revised version of t...

Ancient lens What’s the historical context? A Structured Complaint The Psalmist organizes his complaint against God in three sections. The first two sections dramatize the complaint (vv. 1-11 and...

O God, this day we thank you for your Book. For those who wrote it, for those who lived close to you, so that you could speak to them and so give them a message for their day and for ours; We thank ...

We all know our world has sped up to a frenetic pace. We feel it in our bones, not to mention on the freeway. But it hasn’t always been this way. Let me nerd out on you for a few minutes just to show...

God’s garden, made “in the beginning,” does not lie behind us, but ahead of us, in hope, and, in the meantime, all around us as our place of work. History without gardens would be a wasteland. What th...

Charles Darwin, known for his theory of natural selection, noticed that his later life included a “loss of happiness.” While he never acknowledged that it might have been related to his changing world...

We must never underestimate our power to be wrong when talking about God, when thinking about God, when imagining God, whether in prose or in poetry. A generous orthodoxy, in contrast to the tense, na...

The Christian gospel is rooted in language: God spoke a creation into being; our Savior was the Word made flesh. The poet is the person who uses words not primarily to convey information but to make a...

A great speech is literature.

‘For my own way of expressing myself almost always disappoints me… I am saddened that my tongue cannot live up to my heart.’

Words can sometimes, in moments of grace, attain the quality of deeds.

We often think of limits as means of restriction, but the truth is far more complex. In certain situations, limitations actually fuel creativity. Consider this short excerpt on the creative writing pr...

Prayer is like love. Words pour at first. Then we are more silent and can communicate in monosyllables. In difficulties a gesture is enough, a word, or nothing at all—love is enough. Thus the time com...

History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.

Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.

I am abashed, solitary, helpless, surrounded by a beauty that can never belong to me. But this sadness generates within me an unspeakable reverence for the holiness of created things, for they are pur...

I sometimes hold it half a sin To put in words the grief I feel; For words, like nature, half reveal And half conceal the Soul within.

"Love! The walks over soft grass, the smiles over candlelight, the arguments over everything else."

Leaves glowing in the sun, zealous hum of bumblebees, From afar, from somewhere beyond the river, echoes of lingering voices And the unhurried sounds of a hammer gave joy not only to me. Before the fi...

[The psalms] become like a mirror to the person singing them, so that he might perceive himself and the emotions of his soul.