Presence Within Absence

by William Britten | Poems in Song, Attention, Cynthia Bourgeault, Poems-Benedictions-Intentions

Crafting poems as songs. From whatever words and phrases arrive during Lectio Divina.

Tintern Abbey was founded in 1131, and inhabited by the Cistercian monks for 400 years until Henry VIII decided he didn’t like the monks and signed the Dissolution of Monasteries act in 1536. The Abbey was left to ruin.

In 1798 William Wordsworth composed his famous poem during a visit to the ruins. Lots of high school English students encounter that poem (including me). I’ve chosen phrases from Wordsworth’s long poem and crafted a “child poem” on the sense of presence within absence in the monastery, now abandoned almost 500 years.

“You know, the lower can take the higher at any second, and it’s all over. Do what you can here. Act as a true human being. And that’s your legacy and gift, … to live as a human being when people are capitulating to mass terror, mass violence, mass flight. To live as a human being, compassionate, open, caring, trusting, vulnerable. Seeded into the planet.” Cynthia Bourgeault, Relearning Trust Sept 2022, 1:21:44 RT 04 Eve Teaching Q&A

Presence Within Absence

The streams still rolling
from their mountain springs,
unhurried and indifferent.
Five hundred years of patience.

This season of unripe fruit
clad in one cold hue.
Wreaths of smoke
Rise in silence from among the trees.

I have been here before.
The aching joy now stilled.

In this dwelling is the light of setting suns.
The heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world.
Nameless acts of kindness
and of love, unremembered.

Nature has not yet betrayed
the heart that loves her.
Let the misty mountain winds
blow against me.

I am old enough
to stand in the cold.
In this moment
there is life and food
for future years.

William Britten