Christian Wiman, “Small Prayer in a Hard Wind”

As through a long-abandoned half-standing house
only someone lost could find,

which, with its paneless windows and sagging crossbeams,
its hundred crevices in which a hundred creatures hoard and nest,

seems both ghost of the life that happened there
and living spirit of this wasted place,

wind seeks and sings every wound in the wood
that is open enough to receive it,

shatter me God into my thousand sounds…

Every Riven Thing is the third collection of poems by Christian Wiman, the editor of Poetry. It also includes “Five Houses Down” (The New Yorker), “Gone for the Day, She Is the Day” (The Christian Century), and “Love Is the Word” and two poems that originally appeared in The Atlantic: “From a Window.”

Wiman is also an accomplished essayist; at the American Scholar website you’ll find “Gazing Into the Abyss” and “Hive of Nerves,” and I might also recommend “Milton in Guatemala” from Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet.

7 November 2010 | poetry |