Kyrie

~ an Ash Wednesday poem ~

Poetry Notes:

*Today is Ash Wednesday, and I wrote this poem for this day some years ago. It’s a true account of a late Ash Wednesday night, after the solemn service. Depending on your interests (if you’re an NBA fan like me), the title may bring Kyrie Irving to mind, and his first name’s pronunciation - “Ky-ree.” But that’s not my intention for this poem. I mean it in the ancient Greek way: Kyrie eleison — a very old Christian prayer translated “Lord, have mercy,” and that I’ve mostly heard pronounced as “Keer-ee-ay ell-ee-ay-zohn.” I wasn’t familiar with this prayer, before joining the Anglican Church. Then I found it as a heading for a part of our Sunday morning service, “THE KYRIE,” and then I began to pray it even more frequently in the Daily Office.

*I knew this phrase more as a southern idiom:

But, mercy! (that’s an abbreviated version) if you look around the World Wide Web for expressions of this ancient prayer, you will be stunned (those are 3 distinct links you’re gonna wanna check out).

*Kyrie is included in my first collection of poetry, Under the Terebinth, in the section titled Liturgy. As I was organizing the manuscript and proposal for that book, to send off to publishers, I realized all my earliest poems fit rather neatly into 4 categories:

1. Wings & Water (I had spent 2 years more or less only writing nature poetry, specifically for The Butterfly Project.)

2. Liturgy (If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while you know how much I delight in and have been transformed by liturgy in my day-to-day life, in weekly worship, and in the annual church calendar). Liturgy and liturgists are words that have some baggage for some folks, but I still choose to use these words. They mean very good things in my life, vehicles of grace, rhythms of Jesus’ resurrection life. I’m also an ordained Deacon, and the biggest part of my service to our church is as Creative Director of our Easter Vigil, so I live into the liturgical calendar, year after year, in a big way.

3. Beloveds (I often write poems for people I love, as I shared with you two weeks ago and, I’m coming to realize, often in grief).

4. Sorrow (a series of poems I’d been slowly working on for years, after encountering a plein air sculpture near where I lived at the time, and immediately having a fantastical scene in my mind to make sense of the sculpture: in it, I came upon a mythical giantess, crying, in the woods. I decided to jot down this strange little idea and a whole series of poems grew out of it).

If you haven’t ordered my book yet, please do, it’s currently on sale! And if you’re willing, the thing that helps a writer most is for you to leave a review. I know I’ve sold at least hundreds of books (from the royalties) but I only have 8 (!) reviews on Amazon.

Now to the poem. If you’d like to hear me read it, click on the video below:

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Kyrie

Racing on the elliptical
against a digital timer
and a faux incline,

I consider my death. 

A red heart flashes 
while it finds
my heart rate — the number

offers me a small comfort
or rebuke. 

I push and pull
like this work matters, till sweat
drops. I haven’t gone anywhere. 

Gregorian chants in my 
cheap earbuds, discordant

alongside the pulsing 
dance-pop that fills Planet 
Fitness, late Ash Wednesday.

Six empty contraptions
on either side of me — 
gasping, alone; I’m thirsty. 

And writing poems? Ridiculous
at this pace. I see 

the ashes 

that mark me 
in the blank TV screen
propped up before my face. The dust 
has sunk into every forehead 
crease, Lord

have mercy. My machine
counts down — 3, 2, 1 —
 

---

MonafolkSPEAK

Ha! There was a rainbow behind me! I turn off self-view, and only ever record one take for these videos, to limit the temptation to obsess over how one is presented and perceived, so I apologize for the various notifications that ring out during this video.

I was invited by the lovely Tamara Hill Murphy to write something for her Lenten day book. If you’re interested in receiving it, via your inbox this Lent, there’s a great lineup of contributors, and I was honored to be included. Tamara set up a special coupon code for *my* subscribers, and it gives you 50% off a monthly or annual subscription to her Substack, Restful, if you’re interested.

Further up & further in,

Anna