an outlet of encouragement, explanation, and exhortation

Category: Poetry

I was Blessed by Joshua Luke Smith!

I don’t know Joshua Luke Smith. Never heard of him before today. I just read a brief article about him (he’s an MK). He’s a poet and rapper who works in prisons. That’s all I know except for the experience of hearing him read a couple of his poems.

What shoved me towards his work was Brian Bakke posting on social media a link to a recent reading of one of his poems which I think is entitled Sunflowers in Babylon. (Either that or Uncle Terry’s Legacy. I’m not sure.) Brian’s advice is serious business for me, so I decided to check it out. I’m not one who is much for poetry, but for eight minutes and twenty-eight seconds Joshua Luke Smith had my full, rapt attention. After he finished, I wanted to read the words of the poem and ponder a bit. I found a transcript here. Wow.

Then, I wanted to find out more about this guy. He’s got a website. The first video on the page “My Work” was a blessing. Would that I could bless like that! And he’s all over the common social media.

Then my granddaughter Malea arrived, walking to our house from her nearby elementary school. I told her I just saw a great video on YouTube. She wanted to see it. It held her attention for all eight minutes and twenty-eight seconds, too. She wanted to know why he wrote it. “Did he write that for a funeral?” I said perhaps it was inspired by his uncle’s passing, but that it was not performed for a funeral. She said she liked it a lot. Then her Dad picked her up to go home.

So this note is my recommendation to pursue some of his poetry for yourself. Planting a sunflower seed? It’s me, one who was deeply encouraged pointing to the source of the blessing. We need some blessing, some hope, some direction just now. The other events in the news out of DC today… Well, I’m not going to go there. Joshua Luke Smith. I’m going to recommend some time with his readings.

The Second Coming

by William Butler Yeats (1919)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Read more about Yeats poem The Second Coming in Wikipedia.

Notes from the Other Side – Jane Kenyon

I divested myself of despair
and fear when I came here.

Now there is no more catching
one’s own eye in the mirror,

there are no bad books, no plastic,
no insurance premiums, and of course

no illness. Contrition
does not exist, nor gnashing

of teeth. No one howls as the first
clod of earth hits the casket.

The poor we no longer have with us.
Our calm hearts strike only the hour,

and God, as promised, proves
to be mercy clothed in light.

Jane Kenyon
Notes from the Other Side