CRWROPPs Post: Poetry of the Sacred Contest

 

Submissions Accepted June 27 through August 1, 2022 The Center for Interfaith Relations is looking for poetry that is inspired by the legacy of Thomas Merton through the contemplative and spiritual practice of writing. Visit our website for more information and past winners, or to learn more about Thomas Merton. ABOUT THE CONTEST Our judges will select (1) winning poem to be awarded the $500 Thomas Merton Grand Prize in Poetry of the Sacred and three (3) honorable mentions to receive $100. Winning poems will be published in an upcoming issue of Parabola Magazine, an internationally recognized magazine devoted to the sacred. Submission Details Entry fee of $15 per one poem, non-refundable. (Some entry fee scholarships are available on a limited first come, first serve basis. Please email Will@interfaithrelations.org for details.) Online submissions only. (If you are unable to submit online, please email Will@interfaithrelations.org or call 502-583-3100) Submissions should be one single piece of work. Please do not include multiple poems in an entry. Submissions should be less than 1,000 words. Submitted work should be unpublished. Simultaneous submissions are expected and welcome. Poem must be anonymous—the author's name or address must not appear anywhere on the attached document containing the poem. Final poems will be selected in early September and all applicants will be notified of the winning poem and three honorable mentions via email. Announcements will also be made online and through the general Center for Interfaith Relations and Festival of Faiths email communications.  The Center for Interfaith Relations' mission is to celebrate the diversity of faith traditions, express gratitude for our unity and strengthen the role of faith in society through common action. Rahab's House Now the lean children of the God of armies (Their feet command the quaking earth.) Rise in the desert, and divide old Jordan To crown this city with a ring of drums. (But see this signal, like a crimson scar Bleeding on Rahab's window-sill, Spelling her safety with the red of our Redemption.) The trumpets scare the valley with their sudden anger, And thunderheads lean down to understand the nodding ark, While Joshua's friend, the frowning sun, Rises to burn the drunken houses with his look. (But far more red upon the wall Is Rahab's rescue than his scarlet threat.) The clarions bind the bastions with their silver treble, Shiver the city with their golden shout: (Wells dry up, and stars fly back, The eyes of Jericho go out,) The drums around the reeling ark Shatter the ramparts with a ring of thunder. The kings that sat On gilded chairs, The princes and the great Are dead. Only a harlot and her fearful kindred Fly like sparrows from that sudden grin of fire. It is the flowers that will one day rise from Rahab's earth, That have redeemed them from the hell of Jericho. A rod will grow From Jesse's tree, Among her sons, the lords of Bethlehem, And flower into Paradise. Look at the gentle irises admiring one another by the water, Under the leafy shadows of the Virgin's mercy, And all the primroses and laughing flags Bowing before Our Lady Mary in the Eden of her intercession, And praising her, because they see the generations Fly like a hundred thousand swallows into heaven, Out of the jaws of Jerich, Because it was the Son of God Whose crimson signal wounded Rahab's wall, Uttered our rescue in a figure of His Blood. Thomas Merton Courtesy University of Dayton Follow us on Social Media! Please follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for #MertonMondays featuring posts such as this... Q&A with final judge Joy Ladin What do you find sacred? I have a complicated relationship to the idea of the sacred, which means "set apart," a meaning that makes it the equivalent of the Hebrew (generally translated "holy"). At first glance, the idea seems straightforward: to be sacred is to be set apart from the mundane. God is the most sacred, the most set-apart. But take the famous line, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts. Heaven and Earth are full of God's glory." On the one hand, God is triply holy, triply set apart; on the other, God is not only in contact with but filling heaven and earth.   In other words, when it comes to God, the transcendence of materiality, dailiness, the basic stuff of human life implied by the word "sacred" leads directly to immanence, the sense of God suffusing all that is. This Moebius strip idea of the sacred – the idea that what sets God apart is God's intimate entanglement with creation – is central to my new book, Shekhinah Speaks, and to my relationship with the Divine. So what do I find sacred? God, and everything that God creates and sustains, which means everything. Maybe "sacred" means a sort of set-apart awareness, awareness that has nothing to do with functioning in the world, required to recognize the divine in everything.   What is your attraction to writing and reading poetry?   As soon as I learned to write, I started writing poetry. I don't know why – I just know that writing poetry was the only time I felt fully alive. Reading poetry was another matter. It wasn't until I started taking poetry workshops in high school that I started reading poetry, but I soon realized that reading and writing are intimately connected for me. When I read great poetry, I want to write poetry. I guess it's a poet's version of the Golden Rule: what good poems do to me, I want to do to my readers.   What is your writing practice? Is it a chore or a meditation?   Writing is work, but definitely not a chore, and I think it is only occasionally a meditation for me. It's still what makes me feel most alive, I think because when writing I feel filled by something much larger than myself – the living language, brimming with all the meaning human beings have given to and tried to express through language. That is always thrilling.   Who do you view as part of your writing lineage?   I feel strongly anchored in many parts of the Hebrew Bible, particularly Genesis, Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, the prophets, Ecclesiastes, Psalms, and the Song of Songs. I apprenticed myself to Emily Dickinson, Cesar Vallejo, Pablo Neruda, and W.H. Auden, and was strongly influenced by a number of eastern European poets as well as Tomas Transtromer. More recently I have been immersed in the classic haiku masters, Basho, Buson, and Issa.   Has your style or content changed over time? Have any themes been persistent?   I've been writing seriously for over forty years, so I have covered a lot of ground in style and content – I feel that real writing always means doing or stretching toward what I don't know how to do. But I've always been a poet for whom sense and meaning have been important elements of my work. While I admire poems, like many of Dickinson's and Vallejo's, that I don't understand, I don't trust my poems if I don't have a sense of what they mean, and if I can't test that meaning against what I feel to be true (that's the Auden part of my heritage). I have long experimented with extended syntax – sentences that stretch over many lines and stanzas – and I think some of my strongest work has been in the voice of speakers I am not, both persona poems (where I'm speaking through a fictional persona) and heteronyms, where I let myself be taken over by another life, as I do in The Book of Anna and Shekhinah Speaks. I have written about and too God for most of my poetic life, and often about death, time, and how hard it is to be human. I like writing love poetry but wish I were better at it. More recently, I've been writing poems about America, democracy, and whiteness along with more personal poems about illness and my mother dying. "But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question." Thomas Merton

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