Sabbatical Poetry
October Anniversary
You are always away from here.
The wind comes in through the leaves
left like a sighed sigh.
I stand and my heart goes on
beating, making its whoosh
happen. Blackbirds come,
explode, come and explode.
Their tree billows ruin,
the world sails on to night
Fire
I will burn like you one day.
One day I will be you,
rigid and altogether fluid
for that little while
such things can be.
It takes a long time
of wanting change
to let it happen
without you.
In the Middle Ages, ignus and lignus,
fire and wood,
happened because the one fit inside
the other, and so when you saw
the chopped, layed-down L
in the fireplace, you knew
it could ignite, it was its nature
to live into the fullness
of its name.
And isn’t God calling
always, always like a fire
which burns but does not
consume?– unless consumation
changes everything
that ever was
lonely and lets it be light
as if light’s been here, ready
from the beginning for kindling.
Making Eucharist
What is the secret of this circle,
this gathering-ring of regular, human
longing? They are beginning
to taste something
deeper than desire,
but what is the way
to talk about it?
It’s not like they’re nice
at every turn to everyone
they meet. It’s not like coming here,
around this table to receive
the Sacrament, makes all
their blood boil with love.
But they are here– again,
and now they are
turning one to another,
the sacrifice of Christ
passing into each in turn, the Body
of Christ, the bread
of Heaven, the Blood
of Christ, the cup
of salvation, until it’s complete,
the circle of the hungry
who know what it’s like to be fed.
At My Son’s Grave
You are gone right here
under layered-ages of lost bones
where shrubs now lift their limbs
in the little wind. Swifts
overhead spread out their crescents
and cross and cross the same sky,
counting their number to see
none are lost. They dip and turn
in the sky where the moon
could be but isn’t, being
New today. You are gone. Here
by the hundreds wings extend curving,
circling in great, odd orbits
an agreed center they see
and I do not see. What I do
is wait for it
to come low, for my arms to surround
this mercurial whorl evening
brings vouching for you, my one
among the ages of all
the world’s unbeheld.
Christ’s Fool
The quest to dance askance at death,
to jitterbug the juggernaut
of fear’s future-fury, flailing
to flummox the flibbertigibbet in me,
but to let there be the threshing blows
and silly martyr embraces
taratellasmically,
and wheel from wheat to perichoresis.
In 2004, the Rev. Marc Burnette, rector of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Birmingham, Ala., took a sabbatical leave to write poetry, processing the death of his young son, Jacob. His sabbatical was sponsored by the Sabbatical Leave Program at Samford University’s Resource Center for Pastoral Excellence.
