For the Lent Course this year we will have a marvellous guide – Mark Oakley – who writes with such humanity, depth and humour about the poetic voice. For him poetry reaches out to our soul and ‘helps us eavesdrop on ourselves’. It ‘turns the full stops of our lives into commas’ and is ‘a life rope which helps us from drowning in our own shallows’. His subject is George Herbert who teaches us that God is the loving friend of human beings who takes us by the hand and invites us to sit down and ‘taste my meat’.
Can poetry help us pursue a path of peace? Can it change the full stops of our inbuilt violence into commas of mercy? We may not be able to say yes to these questions with any certainty but the fact that poetry exists does change things.
I have been on several marches calling for peace in Gaza in recent weeks and found poetry a way to capture a memorable encounter during one of these ultimately hopeful actions:
Is something happening?
The tall man smiled at his own question.
A march, I said.
I was born in Nazareth, he said
As we emerged from Bank station,
And baptised in the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
A dignified face.
I was a refugee at the age of four after the Nakba*.
We could only visit our family who remained every two years.
We parted as gently as we had met.
Jim Sikorski
*The Nakba, or catastrophe occurred in 1948 when half the Palestinian population were rendered refugees at the time of the founding of the state of Israel.
