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ripples fretted like clouds, and liquid light
glancing from an awkward moon that stares,
double-faced, from sky, from water. I begin

to understand how weather—like verse, like
memory, like love—plays with pieces of the past,
makes new of old, festoons bare twigs with

jewels. From God knows where,
miracles come. And for you I am making
this green blessing from fallen rain.

Poetry condenses, compacts, crystallizes experience and insight. The best poetry is translucent, prismatic, kaleidoscopic: It lets light in, and then splits it up, plays with it, in order to reveal something of the world previously unnoticed, or insufficiently celebrated, or inadequately mourned.

Poetry also connects things, and connects us to them. We are part of the world—isolated and insulated as we normally feel ourselves to be—and what happens there happens here, too:

Windy
The maple seeds have spent themselves;
their wings lie mute and brown and tattered
along the grass. The peonies
have let their bloodied white be scattered,
and all this windy afternoon
I've grieved as if it really mattered.

Luci Shaw's poetry examines trees, love, fog, marriage, streams, sex, parenthood, fish, cooking, airing out a cottage, birds, gardening, age, clouds, and death. Indeed, her poetry appeals so widely because she writes about each of us and the world we enjoy, not about the lofty, peculiar realm of "The Poet."

Too much poetry nowadays is merely murky, so self-referential that readers grope and stumble as they try to get their bearings and somehow enjoy it. Shaw's poetry is much more complex than it initially looks, but it welcomes almost anyone who will take the time to sit and read—and especially, as with all poetry, read aloud. Try this one:

Flathead Lake, Montana
"Christ plays in ten thousand places."
    Gerard Manley Hopkins

Lying here on the short grass, I am
a bowl for sunlight.

Silence. A bee. The lip lip of water
over stones. The swish and slap, hollow

under the dock. Down-shore
a man sawing wood.

Christ in the sunshine laughing
through the green translucent wings
of maple seeds. A bird
resting its song on two notes.

We have trouble reading biblical poetry—psalms, prophecies, parables. In our commendable concern to clarify, we often "murder to dissect," as Wordsworth put it. "There!" we say. "Now that we've decoded all this poetic mumbo-jumbo, we can plainly see what this means." We fail to let the words work their divine magic in their intended arrangement, to let them resound within us and evoke perhaps more than one meaning, and more than one response. Reading poetry can help us return to the Scriptures as more patient readers, more attentive to the music of the text, more open to the side doors, back doors, windows, skylights, and trap doors of the Word as well as to the front door of straightforward exposition.

And we preachers and theologians in particular could learn from poets the virtues of being concise, precise, and incisive. Too often we are, in our teaching as much as in our prayers, like the Gentiles who "heap up empty phrases," hoping that we will "be heard for our many words" (Matt. 6:7). Many of us, as the saying goes, don't take the time necessary to prepare a shorter sermon—or a clearer or sharper one. Instead, we ought to pray and preach with both the lavishness of attention and the economy of expression of poets. Less, and better, is more.

So who needs poetry? I do. You do. That's why God gave us so much of it in the Bible. That's why God gave us so much of it throughout history. And that's why, among other good reasons, God gave us Luci Shaw.

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December 9 2002, Vol. 46, No. 13