Aflutter though I came, I’m stopped dead in the gate— an image in its frame— by wonder in full spate and wings of sabled flame that come to consecrate.
The lime-tree leaf’s too pale, yet larvae love to eat. This glory will not fail through all the year’s defeat. a Giant Swallowtail, in summer’s cruel heat.
As breathless as the day beneath weight of drought, I watch the mother lay, then rush into the house and find the air to say, “Come quick! Stand here: Look out.”
Vanity of vanities, says Qoheleth, vanity of vanities! All things are vanity! —Ecclesiastes 1:2
Teach me, O Lord, to count my days that are my only store; for all my works and all my ways, I cannot make them more. Turn me from every wind I chase to look upon that shore where I will find no lasting trace of those who came before.
Nor will I leave there any print upon that shifting sand: No memory will last in it of any who there stand. No matter, for the waves will sing to lead me from the land. I shall be gone, but still the wind comes streaming from your hand.
And I will carry nothing there upon that endless flood; no treasures take, no burdens bear— not even flesh and blood. So I must cast away my care, let others take my goods. But let the wind bring you my prayer across the waves, O God:
Lord, take from me the vanity that tries to write my name here on the margins of your sea where none may stake their claim. When all that is attached to me, all praise, O God, and blame, I leave behind for what shall be, your wind blows on the same.
I feel a hint of autumn in the wind. The first of August: Sure the year’s too young for harvest, but it plumps within its skin. The vintage seems already on my tongue
and in my mind the trees are dressed as pyres, the leaves of yesterday already gone. Nature’s first green is gold; her last is fire, and sunset echoes gloriously the dawn,
consoling me, though I with it must burn. There is a new world waiting in the vine, and what is lost to me in season’s turn is for my children wonder in the wine.
And though we stand each on a different brink, we taste the bitter blended with the sweet. The day comes soon when we’ll together drink, rejoicing long beyond the summer’s heat.
Depiction of harvesting in the August calendar page of the Queen Mary Psalter (fol. 78v), ca. 1310 By anonymous (Queen Mary Master) – this file: scan dated 2009, uploaded (without identification of the source) 12 May 2010 by Ann Scott (medievalminds.comReeve-and-Serfs.original1.jpg), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16340916
“As Isis hid with Horus in the delta from sight of gods as well as eyes of men among the reeds, and found in them a shelter to keep her safely out of evil’s ken, another infant in the Nile lay helpless until a woman drew him forth again.
“His basket like the casket of Osiris was sealed against the tides of life and death, yet he who lay within bore no divineness: His span was barely longer than a breath until he met with such another Isis who saved his life from such another Set.
“And so between two tides he grew to manhood: One bore him down, unlawful child of slaves; the other bore him upward to the palace, there where your slightest word condemns or saves. He rode the two, no rudder and no ballast, a man with gods, a life amid the graves.
“But now he stands upon another shoreline and hears the waves are murmuring his name. He should have drowned before, in the engorged Nile, but all the wide earth’s water is the same: Will he be safely drawn from it one more time, or will his death at last make good its claim?
“Who drew him from the river of his mother to look on light and draw his firstling breath, and drew him forth when hidden in the rushes— for only so his days had any length— will draw him through this sea with these his brothers. No, this is not the river of his death.
“For everyone must go the final journey as through a Nile that none may walk dry-shod, but at the end of all his sun-disc’s turning entrust himself to currents and to rocks, and only he may pass into eternity who has the help and mercy of his god.
“But we who followed him across the desert, we are as dust beneath our chariot wheels— not like the rich, black land the river blesses, the fertile ground the yearly flood conceals. Unless some god bring us where life is deathless, we’re sand where nothing grows and nothing heals.
The waters will not part for us, my father; no one will pull our bodies from the reeds as he was drawn to safety by your daughter. There is a balanced order to our deeds: You threw their infant sons into the water; your sons must now be swallowed by the sea.
“Then when Anubis weighs us in the balance, may he find out some goodness in our souls that makes us light enough to pass his challenge and enter in where death takes no more toll. For surely we will drown here with our chariots: This sea before us like a river rolls.”
A wine for every thirst, and bread for hunger: the fruit of every age of fallen seeds laid on a table, long and ever longer, for all our needs.
But who will bake the bread for your great feasting? No one, O Christ: For all the years we wait, you labor, working slowly as the yeast does. It is not late:
It is the slow transforming of creation. The stones of sorrow grinding this world’s wheat prepare all things for your great fermentation, that we may eat.
And so this dust, this something out of the nothing, becomes the matter of your sacrament until we find, O Lord, that you fill all things in covenant.
So all that you have made you lay before us. The world becomes your bread—which you will break, which hides yourself, which you have given for us— and we partake.
Then no one will be left back in the kitchen. The master sits the servants down to feast on bread he made himself, when we are lifted with Christ the yeast.
Then Abraham drew nearer and said: “Will you sweep away the innocent with the guilty? Suppose there were fifty innocent people in the city; would you wipe out the place, rather than spare it for the sake of the fifty innocent people within it? Far be it from you to do such a thing, to make the innocent die with the guilty so that the innocent and the guilty would be treated alike! Should not the judge of all the world act with justice?” The LORD replied, “If I find fifty innocent people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.” —Genesis 18:20-32
The fields lie at the mercy of the weather; the scythes are sharpening to mow us down, and while the weeds and wheat still grow together, together to the harvest we are bound. Our roots entwined, that is our death to sever, is there no good among us to be found?
Or will you fell the wheat to cull the guilty? You’re only poorer by a loaf of bread, and oh, how great the labor so to sift them and from the sinners pluck the innocent, in a metropolis to find the fifty among the thousands bowed to rain and wind.
You see us scurrying along the pavement, driven by greed or fettered by our fear or moved by love—your own love’s imitation, though crudely copied, muddied and unclear. Look down and find some good in us worth saving although our springing evils choke us here!
Let your perfection make our reaping perfect: The guiltless must not suffer for the crimes of others—let those others have your mercy if it means that the innocent survive. Pour down your rain: Both weeds and wheat are thirsting. Keep us all safe, O God, ‘til harvest time.
Old messes stick. The pot looks clean enough until you take and tilt it toward the light and find what soap and water couldn’t slough.
Do it again, and this time, scrub it right— I tell my sons to wash these ones by hand. It’s fine to let it soak here overnight,
but morning comes much sooner than you planned and after that it’s time to cook again. Get steel wool, scouring powder—hell, get sand—
to scrape away the bits of what had been. “But those are stains—they won’t come out,” they say, until I take the washrag, muscle in,
and elbow grease the leftovers away. For I know, more than they can, how it goes; I’ve scorched enough to learn it, in my day,
and it’s the one who’s tasted it who knows: If I don’t deal with these old messes now, everything else just sticks to them. It grows.
You let it go, but then there comes an hour, a ruined meal—it’s time to get it done. Roll up your sleeves at last and start to scour.
These grimy little battles that I’ve won against myself: This is the grit of love, and you will taste it someday, O my sons. Here’s the steel wool: Your mess has just begun.
Mankind is but a breath; his flesh is grass and withers as the flowers of the field. Though others take his gewgaws—bits of brass, a broken weapon, or a dented shield— he moves across the earth as shadows pass and leaves no lasting mark upon the weald.
At dawn he springs up, growing like a weed that eats the sun and blossoms into shade. They lean against each other in their need and twine as one—strength blooming in a glade— or bend the weaker downward in their greed, though each one of the self-same earth was made.
Either the burning sun, the tearing wind, or sudden fire will wither weak and strong, or else the worm, secret as hidden sin, will lay the tallest in the dirt headlong. No one escapes: All that have ever been are no more now; all that are will be gone.
So such a vine, one morning, sprang and grew. The early sun had not begun to burn ere it was finished, tall and broad by noon, and toward the searing face its leaves it turned so smaller things could shelter where it stood to look down on a city, walled and stern.
One hundred twenty thousand living souls and all their kit and cattle, dogs and cats, they swelter there, on stones as hot as coals, but take no sip, nor let the livestock lap. They sit while thirst and hunger take their tolls, weeping in prayer, in sackcloth and in ash.
But one man in the shadow of the leaves looks down and waits to see the streets in flames, as once this people waited through a siege to see his homeland weakened into shame. Let justice fall on murderers and thieves; they’ll feel at last the yoke and weight of blame.
He watches, but that day it does not come: No flood of wrath and fire the city drowns. But still he joys to know it comes for them, takes comfort in the shade that he has found, at nightfall lays himself beside the stem— At dawn he finds it withered on the ground:
“You brought me from the darkness of the grave; you saved me when they threw me in the brine, and when your light, O God, had made me faint you saved me with the shadow of this vine. I kept my word, and all my vows I paid: Why have you taken what I loved as mine?”
By noon a flaming sun, a melting heat are pelting him—him only—on his perch. The city walls lay shadows at their feet: Its people cling there, singing out a dirge. Maybe their song will reach the judgment seat; maybe this God will yet his wrath avert.
But he alone who watches from the height, he only does not pray to live more days. His one last comfort fallen in the night, he prays for death to end the desert’s blaze. Now comes a voice he knows: “And is it right for such a brief life so to stir your rage?”
“I’ve every right,” he answers, “to my wrath. You’ll kill a vine to put me in my place and let the city flourish that has dashed our infants on the rocks. You call it grace? Now, only now, you turn them from their path. Where is your justice on a murderous race?”
“You neither planted,” answers God, “nor sowed. It cost you nothing, took none of your might, nor could you, of yourself, have made it so. You loved what flourished as the grass and died. I made these hundred twenty thousand souls: Shall I not love them? Is that not my right?”
So all his travail merely comes to this: The same old mercy he has always known. A storm at sea, three days dead in a fish, a city that will not be overthrown: This, this is why he fled first to Tarshish. And Jonah turns away and heads for home.
Late Roman, Asia Minor, early Christian period, 3rd century – Jonah Under the Gourd Vine – 1965.239 – Cleveland Museum of Art.tif Photo By Sailko – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65798975
Kate Bluett 