Michael Griffith is a member of the Newcastle Quaker Group. 

View down to Silver Wattle and across Lake George from the hills behind.

In this context we explored how poets found and expressed their experience of wholeness. Mary Oliver’s poem “The Country of the Trees”  gives voice to her sense that trees, in their magnificent silence and their uncanny stability, are expressions of the creator that far exceed the troubled manifestations of word-bound, divisive, argumentative, reactive humans. The poem ends with these beautiful thoughts about how trees, free from language, perhaps embody a higher level of existence than us:

And none will ever speak a single word of complaint,

as though language, after all,

did not work well enough, was only an early stage.

Neither do they ever have any questions to the gods –

which one is the real one, and what is the plan.

As though they have been told everything already,

and are content.

Here is a powerful image of what is needed to be a true custodian of the divine energy in the world. The poem begins by describing how the country of the trees is free from all the power-play and corrupting influences that are part of the world we inhabit:

There is no king in their country

and there is no queen

and there are no princes vying for power,

inventing corruption.

A highlight of our week was an evening session  with Andrew Brion, published Quaker poet, and a member of the Quaker Poetry Group, who was on a visit to Cardiff in Wales U.K. We wished him to be part of our gathering and invited him to contribute a session via zoom on poems of his own that connected with our theme of the search for wholeness. His poems are all imbued with this quest.  Most powerful was his mysterious metaphoric poem “The sea moves” which, we began to discover, was about his emigration to Australia, and the painful hunger for completeness that this produced both in Andrew and his mother, set against the experience of separation and connection that the ocean kindles:

The sea moves

It’s another country here

but the sea moves in the same way –

the flash of silver,

the mirror of the sky.

Decades ago I know she walked

high mountains purple-heathered

beside my father. From there

maybe she too saw the sea.

Back then she knew me

like the sea knows the mountains:

far off but known – even

through the fog, the snow, the rain.

Knowledge is a fragile thing –

it rolls in waves

and wisdom is not the amplitude

but the shore on which it breaks.

All has changed –

mind and soul and body.

Distance and water and time

these things remain.

I know not now if she remembers

but the sea moves in the same way.

In this poem the image of the moving  sea, helps to bring a sense of  connection of wholeness to fragile human relationships. This is how poetry can have a healing influence on our lived experiences. With the title of the poem, “The Sea Moves” and the reference “All has changed”  there is an obliqua reference to near the end of the poem, there is an oblique reference There are other poems by Andrew, both in this issue of  The Australian Friend and in the first issue of 2025.  You can also find more of his poems on his web sites:

https://www.facebook.com/andrewbrionpoetry/

https://andrewbrionpoetry.wordpress.com/

Another high point was the poem by the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski who became widely known in America in recent decades and whose poem “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” became a powerful antidote to the pain and suffering that occurred in New York on 9/11. Zagajewski’s poem was published on the back page of the New Yorker at this time and brought huge solace to that city and to the rest of the world. The poem was actually written some time before 9/11 in response to the destruction that Zagajewski experienced in his home country Poland. His capacity to find amazing hope in the context of the destructiveness of human beings resonated way bey0nd Poland and touched the hearts of millions of Americans.

Try to Praise the Mutilated World

By Adam Zagajewski     Translated By Clare Cavanagh

Try to praise the mutilated world.

Remember June’s long days,

and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.

The nettles that methodically overgrow

the abandoned homesteads of exiles.

You must praise the mutilated world.

You watched the stylish yachts and ships;

one of them had a long trip ahead of it,

while salty oblivion awaited others.

You’ve seen the refugees going nowhere,

you’ve heard the executioners sing joyfully.

You should praise the mutilated world.

Remember the moments when we were together

in a white room and the curtain fluttered.

Return in thought to the concert where music flared.

You gathered acorns in the park in autumn

and leaves eddied over the earth’s scars.

Praise the mutilated world

and the gray feather a thrush lost,

and the gentle light that strays and vanishes

and returns.

You can hear Adam read his poem in Polish here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRNhkHvxssY

and then in English at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrKI7y2Ebns

His profound message that continues to catch the hearts of all of us who are trying to make sense of a conflicted world, is that we need to find a deep gratitude, an attunement to all those many life-giving , so seemingly insignificant, yet deeply nourishing moments of everyday experience- the wild strawberries, the nettles, the fluttering curtain, the thrush’s grey feather, the gentle light. Here he offers us a way of seeing through the blur of our usual distracted and distressed states of mind, finding the way of becoming truly alive to the reality that exists in every seemingly irrelevant moment: a way towards “the only whole thinking: poetry”

You can see the significance of Zagajewski’s poem, in the context of New York at 9/11, here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPl-dZY8zFo

Another high point of the week were the poems by the American Indian poet Joy Harjo, the 23^rd Poet Laureate of the United States, a member of the Mvskoke Nation who uses her amazing capacity for song to call back the spirits that have left her and that can bring her back to a deeper connection to the environment and to the people around her. Her experience shares much with our own Indigenous Australians. Through her indigenous experience she shows us a way to go in the quest for human wholeness.  One of her poems explored was: 

For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet

The poem ends with the appeal:

Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction.

Ask for forgiveness.

Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.

Call your spirit back. It may be caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.

You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.

Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.

Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It may return in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be happy to be found after being lost for so long.

Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and given clean clothes…

Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark. 

This is a song, an exhortation for wholeness in the created world of which we are a part; most especially her song enables us to find this sacred quality in the most ordinary moments of our being together. Here she invites us gently to restore our soul through connecting with the environment (all the animals and birds), with family and friends. It is a spiritual canticle inviting  freedom and release.

You can watch Joy Harjo read and discuss her poem here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ul5fVXH7Ur4&t=9s

Finally, our session began and ended with the amazingly centreing poem by the Anglican priest R.S. Thomas which recalled us all, paradoxically through language, to a deep sense of wholeness, grounded in silence, and freed from the armada of our restless thoughts.

But the silence in the mind

is when we live best, within

listening distance of the silence

we call God. This is the deep

calling to deep
of the psalm-

writer, the bottomless ocean

we launch the armada of

our thoughts on, never arriving.

It is a presence, then,

whose margins are our margins;

that calls us out over our

own fathoms. What to do

but draw a little nearer to

such ubiquity by remaining still.

Further Reflections on The Australian Quaker Poetry group meeting at Silver Wattle.

What is needed to create a sense of wholeness for human beings? How can poetry be instrumental in this process? These were core questions that we faced in our exploration of a wide range of poems, traditional and modern.   Our sessions were underpinned by observations made in a recent book, Cosmic Connections, (2024) by the 93 year old philosopher Charles Taylor. The book reflects on how poetry serves as a deep source of spiritual nourishment in our disenchanted modern age. Taylor addresses the fact that poetry speaks to our yearning for wholeness. And he sees this in the poet’s capacity to name “our modern anguish”.  He explains that for some poets “their expression of … despair makes me feel less alone in the world. In that solidarity, it is as if the cosmos begins to resonate with a sense of belonging. Poetry effects communion.”

We observed this especially in an amazing poem by the Trinidadian poet M.Nourbese Philip, “Discourse on the Logic of Language”.

In this poem, her post-colonial suffering, caused by her dislocation from her tribal roots expresses itself through her search for her deepest mother tongue in a world where this has been overlaid by all the languages of the dominant, dominating culture that she has been forced to grow up in. The poem or song ends with the pained, poetic lament that brings about a fusion between her anguish and her search for an authentic language:

a foreign anguish

is English

another tongue

my mother

mammy

mummy

moder

mater

tongue mother

tongue me

mothertongue me

mother me

touch me

with the tongue of your

lan lan lang

Language

l/anguish

anguish

english is

a foreign anguish

Poetry here is being used as an instrument for restoring wholeness to someone who was forcibly separated from her mother language, her culture, her roots. How might this apply in varying degrees to everyone of us living on the land we call Australia.

You can hear M.Nourbese Philip read her poem here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=424yF9eqBsE.  And you can find the text of her poem at: https://www.are.na/block/1941474.

In Les Murray’s poem “Religion and Poetry” a deep connection links religion with the living force at the heart of poetry. For Murray, both religion and poetry contribute to the growth of our human wholeness, beyond the limitations of head-centred, factual reason. Poetry, through its music, its rhythms, its symbols touches our bodies, our feelings, along with our thinking. So in this context “thinking” becomes whole, three-centred, rather than merely head-centred. Murray presents us with a challenging and intentionally subversive observation:

Religions are poems. They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture

into the only whole thinking: poetry.
Nothing’s said till it’s dreamed out in words
and nothing’s true that figures in words only.

This was a wonderful place for us to begin our exploration of what it is about poetry that supports our human quest for wholeness.