Gardener

For most of the years that I taught at Dordt, I walked or biked the 10 or 12 blocks between my home and the college.   At some point in my career I began looking for a poem on my way to Dordt.   The flowers that inspired this poem were planted in the narrow strip of grass between the sidewalk and the road—what some of us call the terrace—about 4 blocks from Dordt.   Every year I looked for them, and every year they popped up—always naked as jaybirds. The Naked Ladies ( Amaryllis Belladonna )* Ten naked ladies dally on the terrace slender and supple in their pale pink skin. Arms raised to heaven they are nonchalantly naked as they dance in languid steps to the rhythm of the breeze. They have never toiled or spun only frolicked in the sun. Ten naked ladies shiver on the terrace blotched and wretched in their weather-wrinkled skin. By hot winds harassed they silently struggle to hold up each other as they bend to the curb. They hav...

I once received a short letter from theologian Stanley Hauerwas in response to an article I had written in Perspectives Magazine .  It was a pretty extraordinary thing for me to get a written letter (this was a bit before email responses became easy) from anyone and especially the man whom  Time  called the best theologian in America. Since then I have read just one book by Hauerwas, his memoir  Hannah’s Child , and I can assure you it is a wonderful read.  I read it several years ago but went back to it recently because I remembered that he was concerned with what might be called today “Christian Nationalism.”  Here are a few sentences from a  Time  essay he wrote shortly after 9/11: G. K. Chesterton once observed that America is a nation with the soul of a church.  Bush’s use of religious rhetoric seems to confirm this view.  None of this is good news for Christians, however, because it tempts us t...

I once received a short letter from Stanley Hauerwas in response to an article I had written titled “The Vigor of Wild Virtue.”   It’s a pretty extraordinary thing to get a written letter (this was a bit before email responses became easy) from anyone and especially the man whom Time called the best theologian in America. I have read just one book by Hauerwas, his memoir Hannah’s Child , and I can assure you it is a wonderful read.   I read it several years ago but went back to it recently because I remembered that he was concerned with what might be called today “Christian Nationalism.”   Let me just tease you with a few sentences from a Time essay he wrote shortly after 9/11: G. K. Chesterton once observed that America is a nation with the soul of a church.   Bush’s use of religious rhetoric seems to confirm this view.   None of this is good news for Christians, however, because it tempts us to confuse Christianity with America.   As a result, C...

A friend recently asked me to explain the roots of the word crotchety .  I am not sure why she wants to know the history of the word.  I hope it is not so that she can use it with more vigor as a descriptor of her husband or her boss.  Perhaps she, herself, feels crotchety. The word crotchet means “forked or hooked or bent or curved,” and it comes from the same root as crook , the hooked staff of a shepherd.  Those of us who remember grandmothers or aunts who crocheted (pronounced cro-shayed ) know what the crochet hook (a redundancy) looks like.  We can also understand that the robber we call a crook is someone with a bent moral sense.  And if we call our husband or wife or boss crotchety, what we are really saying is that he or she has a personality full of little hooks and forks. I know we usually think of crotchety as an adjective with negative connotations.  But think for a moment how boring life would be if people were not crotchet...

Suppose you were a pretty good high school baseball player in your day and have been for your whole life an avid major league baseball fan.   One ordinary spring day you go to your mail box and find a roster of this year’s All Star game.   You read it, and notice that your name is on it—along with old time players like Willie Mays and Rod Carew and current players like Mike Trout and Nelson Cruz. That’s a little bit how I felt when, a couple of days ago, I went to my mailbox and found a book of poems with the title Final Exam .   It was a book containing eighty-five poems written by sixty-five different poets, all of the poems about teachers and their students.   As I perused the index I saw names like Jane Kenyon, Billy Collins, Ted Kooser, Theodore Roethke, Carl Sandberg, William Stafford and many more, a Who’s Who of American Poetry over the last hundred years.   I saw some of my favorite poets and poems:   John Ciardi’s “On Flunking a Nice Boy o...

Several weeks ago (May 8) I issued a challenge to readers to figure out the connection between my son Luke’s poem “Bee Still” and my poem “Ascension.”   Several of you responded and one of you, my boyhood friend John Rozeboom, got it mostly right.   If you read the last word of each line of my poem--in order--you will have Luke's poem.  This device--placing the words of another poet's poem (or just a line from the poem) at the end of each line of your poem--is called a Golden Shovel--invented by a friend of the great Afro-American poet Gwendolyn Brooks.  He asked friends and fellow poets to write a Golden Shovel poem to honor Brooks and got a whole book of Golden Shovel poems.  Here's another Golden Shovel poem I wrote using the words of just the last line of another of Luke's poems and placing each one, in order, at the end of each line of my poem. From "Where the Spokes Were Missing" . . . I saw this.  And some other night I'll see this...

There are no burning marks where her hands grabbed the railroad tracks No haunted smile hovers above the eerie grass in a nearby pasture After the train had passed, after the whistle’s crazy scream, the ditches grew demons for thistles, and she is merely a clotted pool a glistening stain tomorrow a weak reflection the blooming poppies the tiger lilies making ferocious summer love under the hottest sun in the wildest field The moon will dance a wan dance tonight in her unsweetened blood and the townspeople glad with gossip will shake their heads rattle her last rare words discover hidden virtues at last in a bottom drawer Death by a dumb locomotive, DEATH BY A DUMB LOCOMOTIVE the morning headlines read and stars fall down to worship the saddest death in years and in heaven angels kiss her broken soul and the gods repair her dangling bones oh and her fisheye stare is diamond oh and her sour gray hair is gold   ...

One of the best things about living in a Northern climate is rounding the curve that takes us from winter to spring, from cold to warm, from brown to green, from no flowers to a land lush with flowers.   As we move from May to June, the whole land seems to be in bloom.   Few flowers are more typical of these parts and of rural life in general than the peony. (Most of the farms gardens I have seen—my mother-in-law’s in particular—have had long lines of peonies.) Every year around the second week of June, these gaudy, short-lived beauties burst on to the scene, extravagant in their fragrance, their colors--rich pink, violet, purple and white--their fragile fist-sized blossoms.   The poet Jane Kenyon calls peonies her favorite flowers, remarking that peonies “are not Protestant work-ethic flowers.   They loll about in gorgeousness; they live for art; they believe in excess.   They are not quite decent, to tell the truth.” Another contemporary New England po...

"For daily gifts both large and small, For Jesus, greatest gift of all, For mercies new at morning light, We thank thee God with all our might." For ten or fifteen years now, my wife and I have been saying aloud, in unison, this little prayer before we eat our breakfast.  We love it even though we know the "with all our might" of the last line is trite and could be improved upon.  In fact we did improve it once, but one or the other of us always forgot the improvement as we were saying it, so we just went back to the old "with all our might." This morning I asked her, "Did you think of the meanings of the words as you said them?"   She said she did.   "Do you always?" I asked. "Well, no, probably not.  How about you?" "My mind was on staining the deck," I said. I suppose any of us who speak a memorized prayer regularly would have to confess that sometimes we do not consciously rea...

Below are two poems, one, "Bee Still," written by my son Luke back when he was in college.  The second written by me.  (Yeah, I know, his is better.) Now here's a little challenge:  The two poems are closely related, but how?  If you can figure out the connection between the two, tell me what the connection is by emailing me at dschel@dordt.edu Don't write it as a comment, since that would give it away to others who have not yet figured it out. bee still motionless when he flies he is still in the air pure wing power he flies a million miles an hour and does not move closer to or farther from the flower                                                                 --Luke Schelhaas Ascension Heads tipped back, motionless, they had not quite believed him when he said he was going ...

If you are married and if you are a man, then you are a husband.   But that was not always so in the English language.   Until the 13th century, a male spouse was called a wer .   So a married couple was wer and wif .   Using wer as a designation of maleness has been retained, as far as I know, only in the word werewolf .But by the 13th century, the word husband was used to describe a married man. Husband is a combination of two words, hus , meaning house, and bondi, meaning dweller.   So we have “house dweller.”   But early on husband also meant “master of a household,” in other words, someone of sufficient means to own his house. There is another meaning for husband as well, perhaps several.   We still speak of animal husbandry, and my dictionary defines husbandry as “the careful management of domestic resources.”   Is this meaning of husband related to the male spouse who is a house dweller?   It is, and the connection...

A characteristic of American spoken English from time to time is the emergence of a fad in which one particular word is repeated at the beginning of a sentence or phrase.   For a number of years in the 1980’s the word was “Hey.”   At the beginning of a sentence—especially a sentence that was a response in a conversation—a speaker would say something like, “Hey, I know what you mean” or “Hey, that’s a good idea” or “Hey, you gotta stop thinking that way.”   Almost any opening remark in a conversation could be answered with a “Hey” sentence:   “The preacher had a good sermon this morning.”   “Hey, he hit the nail on the head, didn’t he?”   “Our dog threw up this morning.”   “Hey, that happens.” It became so annoying that a writer for the now defunct Saturday Review of Literature wrote a column titled “Hey Fever” that deplored the overuse of “Hey.” So these days we are afflicted with sentences that begin with “So.”   I think the...

A Blessing Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass. And the eyes of those two Indian ponies Darken with kindness. They have come gladly out of the willows To welcome my friend and me. We step over the barbed wire into the pasture Where they have been grazing all day, alone. They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness That we have come. They bow shyly as wet swans.   They love each other. There is no loneliness like theirs. At home once more, They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness. I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms, For she has walked over to me And nuzzled my left hand. She is black and white, Her mane falls wild on her forehead, And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist. Suddenly I realize That if I stepped out of my body I would break Into blossom. This is surely on...

Today is Earth Day.   What should we do to celebrate?   I would suggest we do nothing.   Stay at home as you have been doing for more than a month now.   Unless you have a local prairie—as I do; then take a walk in the prairie.    Or take a bike ride on the empty streets or a local bike path.   Don’t go to the store.   Maybe if it’s hot where you live, turn the air down, or if it’s cold, turn the furnace off. Like me you have probably been struck by the fact that one of the unexpected and mostly unacknowledged consequences of corona virus sequestration is the huge drop in the amount of carbon dioxide we are sending into the atmosphere.   Marvelous!   The L. A. freeways, I have read, are virtually empty as are streets in city and town and country all over the United States.   Many factories have stopped production altogether and others have cut way back.   Just yesterday I heard this amazing bit of news: oil on Monday of...

Angling in the English Stream Some of you may remember that for about three years back around the turn of the century (isn’t that an impressive phrase!) I had a five-minute radio spot on KDCR Dordt College radio called “What’s the Good Word.”   On it I would take ordinary words, talk about their etymology and history and show how their meanings had changed over time.    In 2003 I published a collection of these words, Angling in the English Stream.   In my blog I plan to publish one of these short word history/meditations each week.   About a week ago, it was the word resurrection.   I have chosen today’s word, alas , because like resurrection, I discuss it in the context of Holy Week.   Alas One of my favorite hymns is the Lenten hymn written by Johann Heerman and translated by the English poet Robert Bridges: "Ah! Dearest Jesus" (now titled "Ah! Holy Jesus” in CRC hymnbooks).   The second stanza of this song is for me the single mo...