Occasions: Selected Poems
()
About this ebook
Marilyn McEntyre
Marilyn McEntyre is the award-winning author of several books on language and faith, including Where the Eye Alights, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, Speaking Peace in a Climate of Conflict, When Poets Pray, Make a List, Word by Word, and What's in a Phrase? Pausing Where Scripture Gives You Pause, winner of the 2015 Christianity Today book award in spirituality.
Read more from Marilyn Mc Entyre
Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, 2nd ed Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Long Letting Go: Meditations on Losing Someone You Love Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Make a List: How a Simple Practice Can Change Our Lives and Open Our Hearts Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dear Doctor: What Doctors Don't Ask, What Patients Need to Say Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Faithful Farewell: Living Your Last Chapter with Love Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Word by Word: A Daily Spiritual Practice Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWord by Word: A Daily Spiritual Practice Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Long Letting Go: Meditations on Losing Someone You Love Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAdverbs for Advent: Quiet Reflections for a Noisy Time Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Speaking Peace in a Climate of Conflict Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5When Poets Pray Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5What's in a Phrase?: Pausing Where Scripture Gives You Pause Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5When Poets Pray Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Speaking Peace in a Climate of Conflict Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhere the Eye Alights: Phrases for the Forty Days of Lent Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Reading Like a Serpent: What the Scarlet A Is About Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Occasions
Related ebooks
Rhyming Boy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Girl of the Period, and Other Social Essays (Vol. 1&2): Complete Edition Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPoems for a Winter Afternoon Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Night at Gatsby's Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Lesson in Spring: Seasons, #1 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCreole Composition: Academic Writing and Rhetoric in the Anglophone Caribbean Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGlobal Political Leadership and the Public: An Essential Guide To Learn the Necessary Skills and Mindset Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEkphrasticism: Painted Words Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPoems in a Pandemic Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Study Guide for William Carlos Williams's "This Is Just to Say" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPoems from the Heart: Second Edition Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSeekers of Truth and Tranquility Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHudson Valley's Four Seasons Captured in Photos and Prose Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWalk Deep: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSoul Journeys & Other Travels Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPoems for Kids: For Childhood and Youth Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIncarnation: Daily Poems for Advent Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChristmas Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSelected Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPits and Praises Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWhat Has Been Left Behind Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsJust Wild Enough Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSomething New to Say: Words of Spirit, Faith and Celebration for Advent and Christmas Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAnd Luckier Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOver the River and Through the Woods Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCome, Walk With Me! ~ A Collection of Poems & Very Short Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMy Barefoot Rank Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTwenty-First Century Renderings Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBone Willows Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings’Tis The Season: Written Tales Chapbook, #6 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Poetry For You
The Odyssey: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Inward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dante's Divine Comedy: Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Canterbury Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Daily Stoic: A Daily Journal On Meditation, Stoicism, Wisdom and Philosophy to Improve Your Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dante's Inferno: The Divine Comedy, Book One Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Prophet Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Iliad of Homer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Iliad: The Fitzgerald Translation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Love Her Wild: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Poems That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men on the Words That Move Them Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beowulf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tao Te Ching: A New English Version Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Twenty love poems and a song of despair Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Letters to a Young Poet (Rediscovered Books): With linked Table of Contents Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bedtime Stories for Grown-ups Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dream Work Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Way Forward Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Complete Poems of John Keats (with an Introduction by Robert Bridges) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Divine Comedy: Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Edgar Allan Poe: The Complete Collection Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (ReadOn Classics) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Complete Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leaves of Grass: 1855 Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gilgamesh: A New English Version Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for Occasions
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Occasions - Marilyn McEntyre
Advent on the Central Coast
Sun falls on grass
as green as April’s.
Shadows of passing clouds
barely darken the patio tiles.
Only a breeze reminds us
this is not spring, but a season
of long nights and inward turning.
The purple candle is lit. Three more
wait untouched in a fresh wreath
for Sundays to pass in solemn procession
as the season unfolds. Ancient
rituals survive among all the year’s
particulars: a sick friend needs solace,
a project is completed, a child is born.
Once again we lay aside
what has befallen and beset us
to prepare a way for what is coming.
The time is near,
we sing,
for the crowning of the year . . . .
Despite fatigue, delays, digressions,
there will be a feast.
We must make ready.
❧
River Walk, January 6
Where river laps the shore
small birds and burrowing creatures
find what they need.
An egret stands listening.
Her quiet stills us for a moment,
and we listen, too.
Home from our walk, and warm,
we reheat yesterday’s barley stew
and make tea and talk
while afternoon turns to evening.
Lights on the little tree and candles
mark the twelve days
from Christmas to Epiphany.
At the edge of a year so many begin
with unsettled hopes we gather
reasons to rejoice, having returned
from another edge, peered into a chasm
and seen how even there light
suffuses the hospital room, the face
of a nurse nearing the end of her shift,
the riparian dreamspace
where what cannot be said
may be heard. We know now
how celebration honors
survival, how a turning year marks
what has been saved and given again,
how every day we stand
at the edge of time. How if we listen
we may hear the flights of angels
whose song sustains us still.
❧
February Again
Just as the year curves into spring
and small buds break
and fill the eye with pink
I wake at dawn and know
you have long since risen
into your own quiet beginning,
tiptoeing past small sleepers
and into the still chill air
with its reminder of winter.
You came on a day like this
as morning verged into afternoon
and leftover snowdrift softened
every sound, your small cry
a heart-stopping greeting, tentative
as the spread of a fledgling’s wings.
Every year in the wide wake of Christmastide
February brings its hints of hope, and you
emerge again into what awaits you.
The season, waxing from Christmastide
to Lent, takes its appointed time