SERMONS & WRITINGS

"THE SECOND
COMING"
By William Butler Yeats
(Read by Frank Bowles)

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
ceremony of innocence is drowned;
best lack all conviction, while the worst
full of passionate intensity.

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

Three About Cats
by Barbara Bowles
(Read by Frank Bowles)

"CATS"

I never see cats coming
Or even just having come:
They are always having been there,
Watching me.

"SLITTED WATCH"

Three cats hunched in thin sun
Keep slitted watch
Over the wings of the morning.

The black one, bunched up,
Snuggles down
Smack in the middle of the tarmac drive,
And our own Lady Sarah,
Scrunched up, paws under,
Mingles with the calico shingles
On the roof across the way,
While the grey
Rides the fence post
Through the mist.

They are all,.
Over the arched rim of sleep,
Obliquely cognizant
Of every single
Possibly
Surprising thing.

"OCTOBER BLESSING"
 
An old white cat
Who could not see
Sat beneath a linden tree
And yellow leaves came raining down
With a whoosh-pat, whoosh-pat on the ground,
And the sky was blue as the sparkling sea
And a lemonade sun was splashing me!

* * *

"ATLAS"

by Rod McCuen
Read by Deb Legel

Don't be afraid
to fall asleep with gypsies
or run with leopards.
As travelers or highwaymen
we should employ
whatever kind of wheels it takes
to make our lives
go smoothly down the road.
And if you love somebody
Tell them.
Love's a better roadmap
for trucking down the years
than Rand McNally ever made

From GITANJALI

by Rabindranath Tagore
Read by Vicki Anderson

Pluck this little flower and take it, delay not! I fear lest it droop into the dust.

It may not find a place in thy garland, but honour it with a touch of pain from thy hand and pluck it. I fear lest the day end before I am aware, and the time of offering go by.

Though its colour be not deep and its smell be faint, use this flower in thy service and pluck it while there is time.

"HEAVEN"
by Herb Conley

Heaven is a place
Sometimes forgotten
That can be heard
When coming out of a sleep.
The sound as flow of the ocean
The crashing of waves
A murmur from somewhere deep
People swimming
Splashing
From the surface someone weeps
In the waking hour
During the dancing mist
Hearing into the mind creeps.
When the hour passes
And the sun begins to shine
Looming larger than life
Like mountains
Is heaven yearning.

"OUT OF THE STARS"
by Robert Weston
Read by Alice Fadner Woodrum

In honor of her late husband, Bill Fadner
 

Out of the stars have we come,
up from time,
Out of the stars have we come.

Time out of time before time in
the vastness of space earth
spun to orbit the sun,
Earth with the thunder of
mountains newborn, the boiling
of seas.

Earth warmed by sun, lit by sunlight:
This is our home;
Out of the stars have we come.

Mystery hidden in mystery; back
through all time;
Mystery rising from rocks in the
storm and the sea.

Out of the stars, rising from
rocks and the sea,
kindled by sunlight on earth,
arose life.

 

Out of the sea to the land, up
from darkness to light,
Rising to walk and to fly,
Out of the sea trembled life.

Ponder this thing in your heart,
life up from sea:
Eyes to behold, throats to sing,
mates to love.

Life from the sea, warmed by
sun, washed by rain,
life from within, giving birth,
rose to love.

This is the wonder of time; this is
the marvel of space; out of the
stars swung the earth; life upon
earth rose to love.

This is the marvel of life, rising
to see and to know;
Out of your heart, cry wonder;
sing that we live.

Untitled
by Deb Legel
April 2, 1972

Easter Sunday found us worshipping
in nature's green cathedral
pondering warm sun cool pines
birds
and the footprints of those who had gone before us.
Pleasuring whenever pine fragrance
touched our noses
and as pine needle paths
muffled our footsteps.
We stopped once to sit in the sand
to lose ourselves in time
you with binoculars
and I by speculating
the number of grains of sand in the world.
I thought of the traditional Easter--
the churchgoers in new hats
and stiff shoes--
We missed that in our cathedral.
We had peanut butter sandwiches,
oranges and jellybeans.
We playfully poked a spider
and looked for deer,
We found nature in ourselves
and in that cathedral--
a sermon I'd gladly make again
early some Sunday morning.

"MENDING WALL"
by Robert Frost
Read by Debbie Peyton

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."
Spring is the mischief in me and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old stone-savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me--
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying
And he lives having thought of it so well,
He says again, "Good fences make good
neighbours."

Olivia
By Jim Uaughn
Read by Kathy Vaughn

A grand baby girl,

a jar of life,

a can of worms,

toes and fingers full of squirm and wonder,

mouth full of green songs

of untranslatable histories

and un imaginable futures:

you give me back (and I thank you) my song;

you make me remember where

the gods and goddesses reside--

in the small and innocent creatures

all around us and under foot,

and in that small piece of innocence left

in me, hiding, lying pressed by brown

volumes of daily living, daily dying;

I see you bathing in dandelions,

surprising splash of yellow uncultivated,

neither wished for nor sought after,

but there they are,

spatters of living sunlight,

and here's another Spring.

And here's another Spring.

And here's another Spring.
 

"MOUNTAIN
FLOWERS"
by Marco DeGaetano

You pointed them out to me as we walked
The needle-soft path,
The dog racing, chasing far ahead of us,
"Those are bluebells," you said, "and the red ones over there
are Indian paintbrush."
Raised in mountains, you felt at home
among the aspen, streams, and rocks.
You watched in silence by the beaver's lodge,
And beamed when the hawk hovered overhead,
("A good omen," the white robed priest had said).
On our walks, you always stopped to gaze, wordless,
At the bugling elk, the staring, big horned sheep,
All the rest whose lives you held so close
To shelter and preserve.
When your end came, you must have been dreaming:
A dream of flowers, streams, and quiet, peaceful times,
A slow glide down the champagne powder slopes, perhaps,
So different from the sudden nothingness
that took your breath, your bones, but not your beauty.
As you had asked, we took your ashes, divided them,
for each of us to scatter as we would.
I took my share to the cool shade
next to the double trees,
along the mossy path
where the bones of your best friends, our two companions,
already lay.
When I moved the rocks and
Scraped out the hole
I sifted you all together, close and close.
And then, the dirt and stones replaced,
Paused to make a small arrangement,
An offering,
Of bluebells, aspen fronds, Indian paintbrush.
My delicate creature
My mountain flower, good-bye.