A fabulous poem that keeps working on me from Krista Tippett's "OnBeing" interview with poet Christian Wiman.
You can hear it read by clicking
here.
"Mr. Wiman: So the title is "Every
Riven Thing," and riven is kind of an Old Testament word meaning broken,
sundered, torn apart. This was actually the first poem that I wrote
after years of silence, all those years I mentioned. I had gone I think
it was three years without having written a poem. And in the middle of
all those dramatic things happening to me, this was one of them. I sat
down one day and found myself writing again and this poem came to me all
of a sudden. It was quite a shock to write a poem and quite a shock to
write a poem especially like this one. "
God goes, belonging to every riven thing he's made
sing his being simply by being
the thing it is:
stone and tree and sky,
man who sees and sings and wonders why
God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he's made,
means a storm of peace.
Think of the atoms inside the stone.
Think of the man who sits alone
trying to will himself into a stillness where
God goes belonging. To every riven thing he's made
there is given one shade
shaped exactly to the thing itself:
under the tree a darker tree;
under the man the only man to see
God goes belonging to every riven thing. He's made
the things that bring him near,
made the mind that makes him go.
A part of what man knows,
apart from what man knows,
God goes belonging to every riven thing he's made.
.......................................
From the book "Every Riven Thing" by Christian Wiman. Copyright © 2010 by Christian Wiman. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
