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.

In 1978, the poet Carolyn Forché said to her friend Samuel Green, ““If you want to write a certain kind of poem, maybe you should consider living the sort of life from which such poems might come.”

It was a comment that changed Green’s life. He and his wife moved to Waldron Island north of Puget Sound where they built a log house together and settled down to live within a small community. “In a small community, what happens to people matters to you in very immediate ways,” he said at a reading at Wabash College. “You learn to live with people you don’t like, you learn that not liking someone is not an excuse for not being with them. I had to live with people as they are, not the way I wanted them to be, which was a great gift for me: I had to change myself because I couldn’t change other people.”

I keep coming back to Green’s thoughts about community while reading his poem “Notes on ‘Mole Greeting the Sun’ Bronze by Philip McCracken.” Here is the poem in full.

“Notes on ‘Mole Greeting the Sun’ Bronze by Philip McCracken”

By Samuel Green

He has brought everything
into the open, stood it on its hind
legs, tail hanging limp as wet string,
hind claws curved over a base
like the blunt top
of a carrot. Its forepaws are held out
palms open, the way a leaf offers
itself. This is not the moment
of epiphany, but the sole moment
when epiphany is possible, the slope
of its long snout lifted, thrust
forward beyond the tight slits
of its eyes toward something bright
as the wings of a hawk in descent.
Shouldn’t we want to be like that,
lifting ourselves out of the dim
tunnel of safety,
facing something past
the familiar touch by
which we learned ourselves, declaring

Here am I Here am I

Green sees the potentialities in the mole’s gestures. He is clear that the statue doesn’t depict a moment of epiphany, but rather “the sole moment when epiphany is possible.” We often think that epiphany just happens, seizing us at odd and unexpected moments. But Green asserts that epiphany is something that we can open ourselves up to, maybe with nothing more than an animal’s gesture of welcoming the sun.

But then he goes on. The mole is not engaged in a simple gesture. In order to open itself to epiphany it has to leave “the dim tunnel of safety,” and for Green that sense of safety rests on the learned self. It rests on all of the experiences and memories that teach us who we are. We are not born with a sense of self, but develop it through contact with other people, through risk and struggle and seeing ourselves and our actions reflected in the lives of others, especially of those we don’t particularly like.

It is hard not to read this poem as a meditation on Green’s life in the Waldron Island community. There is a kind of moral nakedness in the life of a small community. We are deeply seen, and our actions carry a great deal of weight. But we are also defined by such community, if we are courageous enough to greet it with open arms and say “Here I am.”