On the 21st
of February Philip Harvey conducted the first Spiritual Reading Group for 2017
on the writings of Rowan Williams. One of the passages was Rowan Williams’ poem,
‘Yellow Star’, first published in ‘The Other Mountain’ (Carcanet, 2014, pages
44-45). Here is the poem, followed by the reading.
for Mother Maria Skobtsova
If we were true Christians, we
would all wear the star.
Mother
Maria
Take down the star from the
treetop:
after these two millennia, it is
jaundiced,
scorched, its points still sharp
enough, though,
to draw blood. When it first
shone,
it lit the way to killing fields.
It has not
lost its skill.
Pin the star with its glass
spikes
over today’s selected carriers
of the infections clouding the
future’s
blood. The star has made the
rivers bitter,
bitter, the scorched neighbours
cry out
with burnt tongues.
Pay for the star with forged
certificates
of baptism, papers of citizenship
securing
the right to emigrate from
Christendom’s
collapsing planet; hold up your
hand
where the points have caught and
drawn
polluting blood.
Step out, star child, into the
queues
of neighbours lit by the lethal
sign;
take bitter food and drink from
the hand
of neighbours who pay the long
price for being
there, always, under the light
when we need
guilty strangers.
Hold up your hand; the star-drawn
blood
binds you into the stranger’s
place.
While the light lasts, think how
it is
that the dust of burned stars,
the immeasurable
dust travels darkly over light
years to reassemble,
alive and moist.
Reading:
Mother Maria Skobtsova is a saint
of the Russian Orthodox Church who fought in the French resistance and died in
Ravensbruck Concentration Camp in March 1945. The star she refers to in the
epigraph is the yellow star Jews were enforced to wear during the Nazi
persecutions. Her intent is unambiguous: anyone who follows Christ must be
prepared to identify with the victims of persecution. They must call out
injustice when and as they see it. Furthermore, they must identify with their
own indebtedness to Judaism, with the Gospel’s profound Jewish sources.
Maria Skobtsova was herself a
poet. In July 1942, when the order requiring Jews to wear the yellow star was
issued, she wrote a poem entitled "Israel":
Two
triangles, a star,
The shield
of King David, our forefather.
This is
election, not offense.
The great
path and not an evil.
Once more in
a term fulfilled,
Once more
roars the trumpet of the end;
And the fate
of a great people
Once more is
by the prophet proclaimed.
Thou art
persecuted again, O Israel,
But what can
human malice mean to thee,
who have
heard the thunder from Sinai?
Rowan Williams takes this a step
further by connecting the yellow star with that most renowned emblem of
Christian story, the Star of Bethlehem, the one we place each year on top of
our Christmas trees.
Take down the star from the
treetop:
after these two millennia, it is
jaundiced,
scorched, its points still sharp
enough, though,
to draw blood. When it first
shone,
it lit the way to killing fields.
It has not
lost its skill.
No Yuletide sentiment here, only
then Rowan re-imagines the purpose of that star in new ways. He gives us a
series of (almost episcopal) imperatives. We must pin the star as a sign of
recognition of our collective desecration of the created world. We must live
with the cost of belonging to Christ through baptism. We must identify with the
strangers who live in our midst, and we must go out and meet those strangers.
We must accept our own finiteness in this our one world, ready for whatever it
may bring next. We must make ourselves accountable.
I have never met a poet who wears
a beret, yet it remains a curious and palpable symbol of the poet in our
culture, a kind of adopted halo. When Rowan puts on the beret he does so with
deliberate intentions. He is not one playing just for the sake of play, not a
believer in art for art’s sake. This is a person who speaks three languages
fluently and reads at least nine languages with ease. Russian and French are on
the list.
I have written before about his
gift. “He engages with the life of words, their meanings, ambiguities, colours,
their playfulness, invention, sounds. We find this in those writings of his
that deliberately don’t touch both sides of the page, but also in his sermons,
meditations, exegeses, his essays, disquisitions, lectures. His poetry is a way
of finding expression for things that he could not say as effectively by any of
his other writerly means. And, at least for me, his poetry is a distinctive and
distinctively different voice, mode, vehicle to his other forms of writing.”
In his recent book ‘The Edge of
Words’ Rowan says of words in poems, “… they act none the less as warning signs
that this discourse will be something distinct from the usual exchanges of a
culture: it will invite us to set aside for this listening period our
assumptions about identity, about the solidity or closure of our perceptions.”
(EW, 132) Words and phrases are forced into action in this poetry, used to vary
and double in meaning, taken from their basic etymology and improved by
memory’s definitions. As he says elsewhere, “This is indeed language under
pressure deployed as a means of exploration, invoking associations which may be
random in one way, yet generate a steady level of unsettling alternative or
supplementary meanings in the margin of the simple lexical sense,” (EW, 133)
‘Yellow Star’ is just one straightforward example of how Rowan employs “warning
signs”, both in the sense of it being a distinctive poem at work in the world
and the star symbol in the poem itself being a warning. The poem inhabits its
own space, offers its own way of thinking about existence, sets itself firmly
in a very recognisable time and place, and uses a shared symbolic language to
overturn and re-think that symbolism. At one level, the poem speaks for itself,
says it all in one go. It’s like there’s nothing more to say. At another level,
every line opens up chances for multiple meanings and fruitful interpretation.
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