Steve West: Naming the good works of Creation

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, June 13th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. Up next: WORLD Commentator Steve West on how good poetry can help us slow down and savor God’s Creation.

STEVE WEST, COMMENTATOR: I stand at the perimeter of our backyard. Huddled by the fence, lies our grill, veiled, like it is ashamed of its diminutive stature. Arcing above the tired fence is a maple that once nearly died but many years since has bent toward the sun and thrust upward.

A fence. A maple tree. Pulitzer prize-winning poet Ted Kooser writes about such common things yet under his pen the ordinary becomes luminous. Take his poem, “Snow Fence”:

The red fence
Takes the cold trail
North; no meat
On its ribs,
But neither has it
Much to carry.

Kooser is a long time inhabitant of rural Nebraska, and his poetry shines a flashlight down into the people and places of the region. Like any good poet—even one, like him, who is not a Christian—Kooser helps us slow down and pay attention to that part of Creation that’s right in front of us, that part we take for granted. He might notice a change in the weather, as in “How to Foretell a Change in the Weather”:

You will know that the weather is changing
When your sheep leave the pasture
Too slowly, and your dogs lie about
and look tired; when the cat
turns her back to the fire,
washing her face, and the pigs
wallow in litter.

The geese are too noisy, says Kooser, and swallows fly low, skimming the earth. Kooser watches Creation. He reads the clues.

In “The Red Wing Church,” Kooser laments the transformation of a church to a barn:

The good works of the Lord are all around:
the steeple top is standing in a garden
just up the alley; it’s a henhouse now:
fat leghorns gossip at its crowded door.
Pews stretch on porches up and down the street,
the stained-glass windows style the mayor’s house,
and the bell’s atop the firehouse in the square.
The cross is only God knows where.

At first glance, the poem describes loss. But a closer read shows the works of God dispersed–steeples and pews and bells displayed in Creation. God knows where the cross is. It cuts across His good works. It stands over all things.

You won’t find gospel truth here. But what Kooser gets right reminds me of another poet. In Psalm 147, the psalmist tells of how the Lord determines the number of the stars and gives each its name, prepares rain for earth and grass to grow. And the gospels remind us that He knows when a single sparrow falls from a tree.

That’s why I am here, outside, in the surprising cool of a June day, watching a cardinal and robin vie for seed, listening to the fussing of squirrels overhead in the tree, noting an idle kickball lodged against the fence, feeling the wind tapping on my bare knees.

“For God so loved the world,” says John 3:16. I’m working on that.

I’m Steve West.

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