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Marisol Chirosa rscj | Elizabeth Grantham rscj
Photography by Marisol Chirosa rscj Province of Spain South
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Poetry by Elizabeth Grantham rscj Province of England - Wales | Unless the seed How can the seed tell
Whether the earth is grave or womb?
Can it know from the confines
Of its narrow tomb
The springing birth of tomorrow?
But my heart knows
It feels the stirring of life
Seed of love
Sown in the cold clay of my being
Begin your strife
Reach up to great
Through the coiled hard earth of my heart
The sun's heat, love's life-bringing breath.
"He who loses his life for my sake... "
But this is death!
How can life break out of such stiff cold clay
Self slime? Yet I know in whom I have believed.
It is time to entrust vitality to the clay.
"Unless the seed..." there is no other way.
Break the hard earth
With the green shoots of your strong meekness.
He who knows all can do all
And most with our weakness.
Drop your defences, shed your dry shell
Seed of love in my deep heart's being.
This shrivelled emptiness
Is prelude to a fuller being.
He who alone gives fruitfulness
He will bring you to birth, seed of love
Struggling to express the inexpressible
Out of this dark earth.
Who can tell if you will succeed?
"Love is the answer", love's seed.
"And all shall be well!" I hold a treasure in a shell of clay:
Christ, broken in my brokenness.
His heart, sharing creation's grief,
Gives birth to life with healing tenderness
Bearing in pain, with every labouring breath,
New life, that urgent grows to challenge death. And would I rather simply stay at ease
Invulnerable in my complacency,
At any price preferring so-called Peace,
Than risk being wounded in his company?
Christ of the broken heart, 0 let me be
One with thy woundedness, and one with thee! God What's in a name?
A god by any other name, would always be the same;
An attempt to define the indefinable
To possess the unpossessable.
God, Yahweh, Allah, Krishna, Buddha, Tao
You are, here, now, there, then, anywhere, anywhen
At home in everywhere and anytime, other-dimensional.
You cannot be held, owned,
Tied to a particular time and place.
You go through space into allness
Through time into everness.
You are power in the innermost being of things.
You know through all knowing, you are all truth.
You cannot be held; you are all-holding
The enablement of all unfolding freely,
All growth. Light of all shade
You are. I am. And I am glad! September 25 1982, Southall Spinning Spinning, endlessly spinning
Around a self precariously poised
Between despair and presumption.
"Look at me spinning" like Roo,
Flashily spinning in a coloured coil
Of self-worship.
"Sit still my daughter."
Teach me to sit still,
To surrender, to disappear,
To leave myself on your doorstep
Like an abandoned child.
Hope must grow
At the heart of helplessness.
You who can, I cannot;
You who know, I know not.
You who love,
Save me from this endless spinning
About myself, shoddily unreal.
In the awkward, wobbling moments
Of disillusion,
Faith must grow at the heart of emptiness.
God who is other, but not elsewhere,
For whom I am made, by whom I am held,
Make new life to grow
At the heart of the old. Elizabeth Grantham rscj
Province of England - Wales |
