Amy Glynn’s collection of poems, A Modern Herbal, is a truly fascinating book of poems with rhyme and apostrophe at the forefront of her examination of flora and fauna. She focuses, with an astute and insightful eye, on things like “Pomegranate,” “Sword Lily,” “Olive,” and “Foxglove,” among countless others. Each poem offers much to contemplate, and each poem is a world unto itself; but often as a reader I’m fascinated by snippets within poems, little moments that stand out and make me think of the possibilities for new poems. One such moment happens in her poem “European Grape,” when she states the following:
We talk
Of this as though geology
And climate were liturgical, as though
A living sermon bloomed in every row
Of the vineyard.
This particular passage in the poem provides us with the idea of a plant being “a living sermon.” What an interesting idea.
For this prompt, make a list of things seen in recent days. A hawk feather. A snowflake. A fence post. A leaf in a gutter. Write a poem in which you consider the thing as if it could preach. What is its presence telling us? What, if anything, are the details of its “living sermon”?
See Glynn's poem below:
European Grape
Vitis vinifera
In cultivation verity,
My dears. In breeding. In the blood
We find the truth poured forth for all to see,
To taste. To taste, then! From this mud
And stone is born the stuff of lore,
Of myth. The blood of Jove, a sacrament,
A sacrifice, a poor
Substitute enriched by what is meant
By it, until the very drone of bees
Attains a mystical significance,
Until a structure built of Brix degrees
And all the chance
Liaisons between delving roots
And subtle clays, the percolating rock
Infused particulates
Of the water table, rights itself. We talk
Of this as though geology
And climate were liturgical, as though
A living sermon bloomed in every row
Of the vineyard. It could be
As close to truth as anything
Ever is. If scripture's an attempt to wring
Essential meanings from the panoply
Of earthly possibilities, to see
Pattern, then what else would one call
The manuscript of the vines eternally
Illuminate? Trained supplicants who fall
As joyfully
To the subjugating rule
Of order as one might fall into bed
After a long day, every molecule
Humbly subverted so it might be read
In the subjunctive case: "as if it were."
The essence of a thing's a metaphor,
A symbol, which is why it can endure
Indefinitely. We pour
Ourselves into our stories. We imbue
All the subjective vagaries
Of experience with such details as please
Our sense of purpose. What's most true
Is the underlying spirit of the thing.
We serve the story, and vice versa too.
We shape each other. Co-construe.
It's how it works. The ripening
Fruit has its story too. And into it
Goes every thought the cultivated ground
Can possibly conceive of, a profound
Homily on context and apposite
Fecundity, the will to re-express
Time and again how something can transmute
Itself. To cultivate is worship. Press
The issue: all its involute
Complexities unravel to that one
Answer. What we put in is what we get
Back, but in another alphabet.
A sublimation of the sun
Becomes a porphyrin
Page on which all is written, if it's been
A good year. But then, these are all good years,
N'est-ce pas? Ah, bottoms up then. Cheers.