Poetry and Prayer—Day 4: February 29

Written by: Julia Smolucha

I Thank You God… by e.e. cummings

Fly, fast, on infinite wing to draw near to us. Hear our thank you: cardinal perched in snow-winter tree, food warm in bellies, vistas of dream-blue skies. Fly, fast, O God, to be near to us, for we are grateful. Amen.

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Shafts of Light, XI: Raoul Wallenberg

July 11, 2021

Schindler’s List is three hours and seventeen minutes long, all black and white. Its palette is dark and grim. Just two brief slashes of red. To see the little girl in the red coat, in her singular humanity, is God’s calling to each of us.

Shafts of Light, X: Berlin Wird Mauerfrei

July 4, 2021

In late 1989 Don Dale was in Berlin as a student. He reports that in a world before google maps you need only listen to geolocate yourself within the city. Had the hammering away at the Berlin Wall become just a hushed battering in the distance? You were probably half-mile from the wall. But when the belt and wack of the hammers became a deafening roar? The wall was just around the corner. At all hours of the night from November 9, 1989 onward, the wall was slowly being chipped away, piece by piece.

Shafts of Light, IX: Václav Havel

June 27, 2021

Finally, in 1975, he decides he’s mad as hell and isn’t going to take it anymore, and he writes a letter to Communist Party General Secretary Gustáv Husák which became famous and incendiary. He complained about “the aesthetics of banality,” and “the cult of right-thinking mediocrity” in the Communist Party and just completely slandered the whole regime. He called Communist Czechoslovakia “Absurdistan.” Communism, he said, was “a monstrous, ramshackle, stinking machine.”

Poetry and Prayer—Day 4: February 29