St. Stephen’s uses poetry in our worship every week. In these posts our rector, Karl Stevens, a poet himself who publishes as KPB Stevens, will reflect on the poems we use. The poems are chosen by our Canticle Club. If you are interested in joining the Canticle Club, send an email to Stuart Hobbs.

There is a line in Kim Stafford’s “Citizen of Dark Times” that I find awe-inspiring. “Plunder your reticence,” Stafford writes. I would like to put it on a bumper sticker or make a flag of it. Plunder is such a violent verb, invoking burning villages and the theft of cultural possessions. Reticence shouldn’t just be overcome, it should be plundered, so thoroughly conquered that whatever riches it seems to posses are entirely stripped away. But plunder does require riches, so Stafford is saying that reticence does have something of value, some treasure that can be stolen from the context of reticence and put to other uses. Just as the songbird’s song becomes a weapon when it needs to. The poem is about repurposing. Bring your shyness, your timidity, into the public square, it says, and use it to overcome. Let reticence become resistance.

Here’s the poem in full:

Citizen of Dark Times

by Kim Stafford

Agenda in a time of fear: Be not afraid.
When things go wrong, do right.
Set out by the half-light of the seeker.
For the well-lit problem begins to heal.
Learn tropism toward the difficult.
We have not arrived to explain, but to sing.
Young idealism ripens into an ethical life.
Prune back regret to let faith grow.
When you hit rock bottom, dig farther down.
Grief is the seed of singing, shame the seed of song.
Keep seeing what you are not saying.
Plunder your reticence.
Songbird guards a twig, 
its only weapon a song.

This is an occasional poem, written to speak to a particular set of events at a particular moment in time. Stafford is very clear about the power of such poems:

“There is this idea of an occasional poem that is written for an occasion or grows out of an occasion, and often, in literary criticism, such poems are frowned upon — as though it’s an expendable poem that might be useful in the moment but doesn’t have ongoing literary cachet. I don’t see it that way. If we’re having a political moment that deeply troubles me, I’m going to write about it for my benefit and the benefit of others living in this moment with me. But if I do it honorably, the poem may have ongoing use, or value, because the things we’re suffering are going to keep happening. It’s not like we only have one set of political villains. There will be others. And if I can write about this moment in a thoughtful way, what I have written may have continuing use.”

In a way a memorial poem is a constant source of plunder. Its understanding of the world and the points it’s trying to make may seem limiting and specific. Yet it can speak to future events if its specificity is plundered, its meaning stolen by other understandings and other needs. In this way such a poem can also become a seed, its grief leading to singing, its sense of shame leading to song.

A parable is also a constant source of plunder. Stafford’s poem was chosen to accompany Luke’s retelling of Jesus’s parable of the Widow and the Judge. In her book Short Stories by Jesus Amy-Jill Levine writes about the many, many interpretations that have been layered onto this parable as it’s been read and commented on through the ages. Its meanings are often stolen, yet the parable remains. The widow has been made timid by many commentators, when the Greek says that she shows up to give the judge a punch on the nose. She is described as humble and pious, but she goes before the judge to demand vengeance on an enemy. Not justice. The Greek word is ekdikeo, which means vengeance. Levine’s reading runs counter to many, many sermons. She frees us from the cultural accretion of patriarchy. But a hundred years from now the parable will remain, and people will read it differently once again. Plunder will continue. The memorial of the parable will remain.