The poetry of Texas writer Vassar Miller (1924-1998) isn’t as well-known as it should be—because, critics suggest, she was writing religious verse in a decidedly secular age. But I’ve long treasured my copy of her collected poems, If I Had Wheels or Love (1991). Miller was born with cerebral palsy, and her disability naturally finds its way into some of her poems—but many more are grounded in her Christian faith. It’s these that I want to look at in this post.

And I can’t resist beginning with her delightful poem “Morning Person,” which turns the Genesis creation narrative into a single sentence of raucous fun:

God, best at making in the morning, tossed
stars and planets, singing and dancing, rolled
Saturn’s rings spinning and humming, twirled the earth
so hard it coughed and spat the moon up, brilliant
bubble floating around it for good, stretched holy
hands till birds in nervous sparks flew forth from
them and beasts — lizards, big and little, apes,
lions, elephants, dogs and cats cavorting,
tumbling over themselves, dizzy with joy when
God made us in the morning too, both man
and woman, leaving Adam no time for
sleep so nimbly was Eve bouncing out of
his side till as night came everything and
everybody, growing tired, declined, sat
down in one soft descended Hallelujah.

I recommend reading this poem aloud. Just the verbs—tossed, rolled, twirled, cavorting, tumbling, bouncing—will have you smiling, while in the final two lines your voice gets slower, softer.

Softness is the tone of Miller’s quieter poem, “Thanksgiving after Holy Communion,” with the lovely image of its opening stanza:

You come to me like a bird
lighting upon my palm,
nesting upon my tongue,
flying through the branches of my being
into the forest of my darkness.

Like this poem, many of Miller’s religious poems are addressed to Jesus. And while most of her poems—like this one—are in free verse, she did have a fondness for the sonnet. Here, for example, is “Without Ceremony”:

Except ourselves, we have no other prayer;
Our needs are sores upon our nakedness.
We do not have to name them; we are here.
And You who can make eyes can see no less.
We fall, not on our knees, but on our hearts,
A posture humbler far and more downcast;
While Father Pain instructs us in the arts
Of praying, hunger is the worthiest fast.
We find ourselves where tongues cannot wage war
On silence (farther, mystics never flew)
But on the common wings of what we are,
Borne on the wings of what we bear, toward You,
Oh Word, in whom our wordiness dissolves,
When we have not a prayer except ourselves.

I especially like this final couplet: our wordiness dissolving in the Word (Jesus); the poem’s closing line bringing us back up to the opening one.

Miller’s sonnet tour de force, though, is undoubtedly “Love’s Bitten Tongue”: twenty-two sonnets joined in the “corona” form—where the last line of each sonnet becomes the first line of the next. In content, the poem intertwines Miller’s own life with Christ’s, to whom the poem is addressed. Obviously I can’t quote the whole poem, but here’s the first stanza:

Lord, hush this ego as one stops a bell
Clanging, cupping it softly in the palm.
Should it make music, silence it as well,
For there’s no difference when one wants calm
Of silence from the ego’s loud tinnitus
Buzzing in spirit’s ear with no relief,
With every reverence a false hiatus
Which brings those moments I name prayer to grief,
Tempts me to think I better honor them
By turning away from prayer as I did once.
So my thoughts, snared by their own stratagem,
Like balls that children toss aside, all bounce
In my head back and forth until despair
Of praying may, in mercy, become prayer.

I love Miller’s images for her inner distress: “the ego’s loud tinnitus” and “my thoughts,… like balls that children toss aside.” The poem goes on to follow her struggles with physical and spiritual pain, while following Jesus’ life—until the final sonnet brings us to his resurrection encounter with Mary Magdalene:

Being pierced open by Your whisper, “Mary…”
The woman gapes at Your gardener’s clothes
Messy with muck and juices of bud and berry,
Offence to eye, delectation to nose.
So You have opened me to woe and wonder
Much sharper than woe, far keener than pain
Pitching the techniques of thought that might pander
To the gimmicks of mind, but split open mine
That prays, “What shall I do, Jesus, How deal
With those flesh-splitting throbs, pain, dread, rapture
Which rupture my being drooping and dull
To the literal Word, ecstatic scripture?
How may I do it, Great Alpha, Omega
Unless I bow, acolyte to my ego.”

So the poem’s final line returns to her ego, with which the poem opened.

But since Holy Saturday (the day between Good Friday and Easter) is just around the corner, I want to end with the poem that my husband and I always recite on this day: “Easter Eve: A Fantasy.”

The day does not speak above a whisper, is a high dividing
upon a moment into ebbing and flowing,
two pairs of lips neither pressing nor quite yet parting,
the twilight between sleep and waking,
the bowl of hush held lifted to the bird’s first trilling.
Yet the day does not wait. It has become a waiting
as we have become our shadows stuffed full of wind and walking,
and if my hand reached toward you, it would pass through you.
For the world has become a dream of that sleeping Head
which on Friday we pierced and folded in dust
until He awakens tomorrow when the light of His Rising
hardens into hills and crystallizes to rocks and ripples to streams.

The action of the poem begins in all the “-ing” verbs of the first seven lines: on this day between Christ’s crucifixion and his resurrection, everything on earth is left (yes) hanging. It’s only with “His Rising” on Sunday that the verbs settle into present tense action, and the nouns transform from haziness (“whisper,” “bowl of hush” “shadows”) into solidity (“hills” and “rocks”)—and even “streams,” which have a reality, a concreteness that Holy Saturday’s objects don’t.

“Easter Eve: A Fantasy” is one of Vassar Miller’s early poems, yet already her mastery of the poetic genre is clear. She never lost it—for which I’m grateful.

Peggy Rosenthal has a PhD in English Literature. Her first published book was Words and Values, a close reading of popular language. Since then she has published widely on the spirituality of poetry, in periodicals such as America, The Christian Century, and Image, and in books that can be found here.