Marilyn McEntyre is a glorious blend of author, educator, speaker, poet, and grandparent. Her teaching and writing have ranged widely: along with American literature, she has taught Medical Humanities, Literature and the Natural World, Portraiture and Character in Literature and Art, Approaches to Autobiography, and a variety of other writing courses. Her books – both popular and academic – include the likes of Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, Speaking Peace in a Climate of Conflict, When Poets Pray, and many others. She has written for numerous magazines and journals and shared her voice in an assortment of podcasts.
In this interview with Jessica Walters (Radix’ fiction editor) and me, Marilyn talks about the importance of words: loving them and using them rightly and precisely in both dialogue and questioning. Along with words, she also touches on timely topics like the importance of maintaining a gift economy alongside a money economy in order to preserve certain aspects of culture that cannot be commodified. We hope that you enjoy the conversation and the generous conviviality that Marilyn brings.
To learn more about Marilyn, you can visit her website at www.marilynmcentyre.com.
Matthew Steem: What a privilege to have you on with Jessica and me. Along with all your work in the area of words, I truly appreciate the spirit that you bring. To start off, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Marilyn McEntyre: On my website I have posted a bio saying that my interest is in connecting language with spirituality, health, and healing. Those lines of interest have always been convergent for me, but I would say that where my interest in words began was simply in my three-generational household. We didn’t have a lot of money, but we had a lot of conversation. My Virginian grandmother was an English teacher as well as my mother. I also come from a long line of preachers, so family conversation was lively and articulate, though it wasn’t until I was a young adult that I realized what a huge gift that upbringing was.
Anyway, we sat around the dinner table and talked. My parents and grandparents occasionally argued points of theology, which I later realized didn’t happen in most families. But people would quote snippets of things and talk about the sermons on Sunday. They’d talk about the news and express opinions. I’ll mention, too, that we were certainly all expected to be respectful, yet at the same time we were also allowed to have opinions. One of the things I most value, in retrospect, is the gentle correction I got if I used poor grammar. Nobody jumped on me for it, but my grandmother would say, “So try saying that again.” She’d say it gently and she’d say it with a smile, but the point was made. Like, “You know better than that, now, let’s try it again.” So it was that, and being read to a lot, and going to Sunday school where we memorized a lot of Bible verses—all of that was, as I realize now, such a rich legacy.
This morning, in fact, we were reading in the lectionary the line in the Psalms about “more than much fine gold.” I think the legacy of a very active life with words is worth more than much fine gold.
MS: Because the theme for this issue is on the importance of gathering, I wonder if you’d give us some of your thoughts on that.
MM: Well, I think immediately of Jesus saying, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there with them.” That scripture doesn’t say, “I won’t be with you when you’re alone or in your solitude,” but it does affirm the fact that when people gather with the intention of worship or being in fellowship, gathering is a way of inviting and practicing the presence of God.
I also have learned from people who know more about Aramaic than I do that most of the time in the Gospels, when Jesus says “you,” it’s a plural form. We should recognize that, as a Southern friend of mine would put it, instead of “y’all,” what Jesus often meant was, “all y’all.”
I gave a talk in chapel at Westmont one time called “All Y’all.” And part of that message was to emphasize the importance of our being addressed as a community. Jesus addressed his disciples as those he had gathered for a purpose. To use a word like synergy, I think, might be helpful: something happens when people come together with intention and purpose that can’t possibly happen when we’re alone. Really, we weren’t meant to be alone. The verse that is often quoted at weddings, “Man was not meant to be alone” has a wider application. The reality is that there’s so much in life that we really can’t do for ourselves. If we think about it, we are the hands and feet and voices of God for each other. I love the line at the end of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”:
… for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
The idea that Christ plays among us, that the Spirit moves among us and not just within us, is an important affirmation of the fact that we are members of one Body and we don’t do well by ourselves.
Jessica Walters: And to pick up on that, what do you think makes gathering possible, and conversely, what are some barriers to gathering?
MM: Well, I think one of the problems that I have myself felt in, say, gathering for worship, is that in this culture, so much of what we do together has been commercialized and commodified. When people get together to, say, go to a sports event—not that I do this very often, but when I do—I’m sort of depressed by how commercial it is. Instead of celebrating human capabilities and witnessing the strength of youth—you know, just delighting in watching people in friendly competition—it’s been reduced to an occasion where we are intensely commercially pressured.
So that’s one problem. I think the language of marketing has invaded both the Church and the academy in ways that are very troubling. When we ask ourselves what we are here together for, we intrinsically know that it’s not to look at the bottom line. We’re not delivering a product. So when I see marketing language in the Church or in educational institutions—and I’ve worked in Christian colleges—I think, couldn’t we just push that out to the margins? Because that isn’t what we’re supposed primarily to be about. Of course I realize that colleges have to be financially viable. However, I think that retrieving a sense of the deep purposes for which we come together is important. I mean, why would we bother to get up on a Sunday morning and gather? There has to be a better answer for that than either routine or that it’s tradition.
I think there has to be something within us that says, “I do better if I do this with other people; I meet Jesus in a different way.” I’m sometimes very moved when I’m watching people going forward for Communion because I feel as though each one of us receiving the Body of Christ is entering into an intimate relationship with a God who meets us in our innermost selves. I’m newly convinced every time I witness that, of how intimately we are bound together as a Body.
And I can’t have that experience alone at home.
JW: You mentioned retrieving a sense of the deep purposes for which we gather. I’m wondering how much of that has to do with the language we use, how we articulate the reasons for gathering, and how we can articulate that better and more beautifully.
MM: Well, I think I’ll switch as I reflect on that from the Church to the academy where I’ve spent most of my life. I think one way to come back to that center, that sense of our deepest purposes, is to talk about them. Really, I think the meta-conversation is one of the ways we can participate in healing what has begun to disintegrate or become contaminated or defaced in our shared discourse.
We need to step outside it and say, let’s talk about it before we go to the curricular agenda of the day. Let’s remember why we’re here. Let’s talk about learning. Let’s talk about why we would even bother to do this work of education at such expense, and with such deliberation. So I think stepping outside of what we’re doing to recall for ourselves, out loud, what we’re doing, is really helpful.
As I have advised students over the years, I’ve been struck by how many of them come in for their advising sessions at the beginning of a semester saying, “Well, I have to do this requirement and that requirement; I just want to check it off. And I just stop them and say, this isn’t about getting rid of something or checking a box. Where are your curiosities at this point? And what do you hope to learn? Seriously ask the question, why are we here? Because this question brings us back to center: why am I doing this? It’s a really important question to raise periodically.
JW: I would like to ask you a few questions from your book, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, where you compare words to other valuable resources like soil and water. You encourage your reader to steward words just as we should steward those other precious resources. How do we steward words and care for words?
MM: Well, I guess I would refer you to the table of contents. [Laughter]
JW & MS: [Laughter]
MM: I’m laughing because that actually is the question that made me want to write this book. I want to be a person who fosters good conversation and vigorous discourse. I think most of us, in public anyway, have forgotten how to disagree without just throwing spitballs at each other. And the vigorous kind of disagreement you read about in the Federalist Papers or in constitutional conventions, where people like Jefferson and Franklin really went at it, was because it so mattered to them what words were put down on those documents.
So I think about these kinds of questions. How do you maintain clarity and precision and liveliness in an environment where there’s so much shorthand, imprecision, and so many abstractions? How do you hold out against those? And the table of contents is actually my originating list of responses to the question, how do you care for words?
In the very first chapter of the book, I talk about the importance of just loving words—really loving them, taking pleasure in them. For instance, my father loved puns, and we’d always roll our eyes when he’d come up with another pun. But that was actually valuable, that wordplay—taking pleasure in words for their own sake. Another part of loving is valuing precision. When we find just the right word, that’s such a lovely experience.
So often when I was working with students during office hours on a paper or something, and we’d be looking at a paragraph that was kind of messy, they’d tell me, “That wasn’t really what I wanted to say.” Once in a while, I’d offer an alternative: “Is this what you mean?” And if it hit the nail on the head, a look of relief and pleasure would come across their face, not just because I had filled in the gap, but because they wanted to find the word that meant what was in their hearts and minds to say. And finding the right word is like finding that piece of fine gold.
One time with a freshman writing class I said, “Let’s just talk about what you value in good writing. What do you want for your writing? Let’s just come up with lots of descriptors here.” So we got some of the following: I want my writing to be clear; I want my writing to be persuasive; I want it to be entertaining; I want it to be surprising; and so on. Anyway, we got a whole bunch of words down on the board, and one of the descriptors was “lively.”
In that class, there was a student who had recently come from the Czech Republic. His English wasn’t perfect yet, but he was very enthusiastic. And as soon as I put “lively” up on the board Thomas said, “That is it! I want my writing to be lively.”
JW & MS: [Laughter]
MM: So I was helping the students think about the essential question: what is it I want to happen when I find words and string them together in a sentence and offer them to someone else? I don’t think I said this, at least not often, but it seemed to me that writing this list was a way to bring them back to some aspect of the sacramentality of words. After all, we really are bringing a thing into the world that has life to it. We are making a life-giving offering to other people. That’s what we hope for when we use words, right?
JW: It seems to take a lot of time to do that, like what you’re describing with the students having liveliness in their writing might be a work of years of both reading and writing. I wonder if you want to say anything about the time that it takes to develop and steward that kind of care? To care for words is a lifelong endeavor.
MM: It is a project. And it is lifelong. Something that I have done in my writing classes is to give students an assignment to compose a three-sentence, or even a one-sentence piece, and let them see how they can craft a sentence that does something interesting. Just doing this is a way of taking delight in seeing what happens when you put two words next to each other.
The pleasure of teaching poetry is seeing that chemistry that happens when you set two words next to each other on a line before they grow up to be a sentence. And isn’t it fascinating how line breaks in contemporary poetry force you to look at what the phrase does before you register what a sentence does?
So, that kind of slowing down over close reading is revelatory, and it’s surprising to me after all these years of doing close reading. I notice the verb choices in a particular paragraph or notice how the words at the ends of a line might echo each other. How often people will say, “Wow, I never would have seen that.” I’d say that’s because most of us haven’t gotten used to reading that way. Instead, we read for information, or for what we call content, but reading to notice what is happening to us as we make our way through the sentences is a different order of awareness.
I want to go back for a moment to my table of contents though, since you asked the “how” question.
After the first chapter on loving words, the next two chapters are “Tell the Truth” and “Don’t Tolerate Lies.” Telling the truth, of course, is complicated, because truth is, as Oscar Wilde put it, “never pure and rarely simple.” Telling the truth means really honoring the complexity of what you’re looking at and being able to tolerate the ambiguities and the unknowns, along with resisting the temptation to make things too neat or conclusive.
And “don’t tolerate lies” is the flip side of that. Lies have become normalized. For instance, we know that there are public figures—and I mean this as a nonpartisan statement—who have been shown through plenty of evidence to have been lying to the public. They’re also lying to Congress. But we just kind of shrug over it. Here is the thing though: tolerating lies normalizes them. And I feel as though we should be pushing back, even if it’s gently initiating questions to the people around us, like, “Are you sure about that?” or “Where did you get the evidence for that, because it’s not clear to me.” Just raising the question about accuracy seems to me to be an ongoing obligation, and it’s one way that we can demonstrate some resistance.
Another chapter in the book is “Read Well.” As in, learn to read in a way that pays attention to what’s actually being said. One time I had my students listen to a political speech—I think it was a State of the Union Address—and I said to them, “Just listen for the abstractions, the words that end with ‘tion,’ ‘ness,’ ‘ment,’ ‘ism’ … all those words that are wide umbrellas that actually don’t tell us the what, where, and when.” My point in that exercise was to show that political discourse covers a multitude of sneaky, cagey, troubling behaviors with abstractions, like freedom, patriotism, and you-fill-in-the-blank.
But we do this in Christian discourse, too, when we talk about kindness, or when we talk about love, or when we talk about hospitality. It seems to me that one of the most important questions we can keep raising for each other is, “What do you mean?” What do you mean when you talk about hospitality? Or, what do you mean when you talk about kindness or generosity? How is the word generosity different from the word prodigal? Or, you know, what kind of generosity do we expect of those who don’t have great material wealth, and so on. I think just raising the questions to say, “Let’s not move on past that word before we bring some specificity to it” is a way of holding each other accountable.
JW: When you taught within the medical humanities, did that involve teaching poetry to medical students?
MM: It did, indeed.
JW: And I love that because I think as you attend closely to a line in poetry or to a paragraph in a Flannery O’Connor story—which is close reading—that is one of the tools required for closely reading the rest of life and for closely observing the rest of life. I wonder if you could speak to that overlap of that attention to poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and how that attention informs a lot of how we live the rest of our lives.
MM: Yes. Well, I think that reading well is a practice of attentiveness. So, it seems to me that reading well, reading closely, and reading with an understanding that there are multiple ways of reading any text is really important. Every word is multidimensional. All of us bring associations to words. If I say “lilac,” I might be thinking of a Whitman poem, and you might be thinking of your grandmother’s wallpaper, and another person might be thinking of their garden.
Every word has resonance like that. When I worked with med students or pre-med students, part of the point was to emphasize that if you develop a practice of reading poetry attentively, you become a better listener. Because when a patient is telling you something about their suffering or their medical history, you’ll notice when they reach for particular metaphors. You’ll notice where the hesitations are. You’ll notice where the repetitions are. You’ll notice what’s being left out or not mentioned, which is the result of a good practice of noticing. Some of those students wrote beautiful poems. I’m thinking of one student in particular in her first year of working on the wards in the hospital, who wrote some extraordinary poems about encounters with patients. In a few cases, where she had to deliver some really bad news, some of those poems just came out verbatim from her notes on the interview with the patient.
But paying attention to what that student said, and then laying it on the page so that we could phrase it out and see what was going on, was a way of honoring information that added a whole new dimension to her pastoral sense of what she was doing as a caregiver.
MS: My grandfather was a medical doctor, and he would say, all too often, that doctors have the bedside manner of a cobra.
MM: There’s a bit of precision for you. [Laughter]
MS: It’s important for all of us to know that we need to speak the truth, but it needs to be spoken in a spirit of love. Do you think there’s a change that’s taken place over the years? Is there more compassion and empathy? Not that there wasn’t, but is there an increase in that in general, do you think?
MM: I think two things are happening in the medical system and they reflect what’s happening in other sectors of the culture. One is that health care has been corporatized and privatized, and that has resulted in increased bureaucracy. That’s very frustrating for a lot of caregivers. We have these huge strikes—one of them going on right now among health care workers—because they’re tied into a system in which caregiving gets buried under the business considerations of running hospitals, and stakeholders are being given the primary consideration if it’s a private company. But I don’t want to go too far into those weeds, except to say that a lot of healthcare people I know are feeling pretty crushed by the system.
I remember talking to a young woman who was freshly out of her residency and working in a women’s clinic. She said, “They give us so little time with each patient, and we’re supposed to fill out these forms where we report on everything, except sometimes on what really matters.” As an example, she said, “They don’t tell you in medical school what to say when you’re standing in a delivery room holding a dead baby. You’re trying to be with the mother who has just given birth, and you don’t have time to stay with her.” The distress of physicians who witness extra suffering that is sometimes needless has been something I’ve had a real concern about and a heart for.
On the other hand, I think over twenty major medical schools now have faculties or programs or at least courses in medical humanities. The schools are making an effort to bring public attention to the fact that there are pastoral dimensions to medical care and that paying attention to the arts and to the ways that language is life-giving, and to the nature of story are tremendously important. The better doctors can do that, the better doctors they are.
So I think both of those things are happening. Medical education is shifting in the direction of recognizing that medicine is a much wider and humane practice, not just a business. On the other hand, it’s become a business and a huge one at that. The same thing’s happening in education.
JW: I think the corporatization of a lot of different sectors is happening at a language level, and the language being used to describe different things is being altered. There is also the issue of language shifting when it comes to social media, and how gathering in that way is being commercialized and commodified. Could you speak to that a bit?
MM: Well, earlier I mentioned the ways in which marketing language has infiltrated the language you see on church websites, as well as the language you see in promotional materials for schools and colleges. I actually was in a meeting one time where, to my horror, someone was speaking about our curriculum at the college at which I was teaching, and they employed the language of delivering a product. I just thought, “No. That’s not really what we’re supposed to be doing.” Along with causing confusion, it makes the student into a consumer. Consequently, and somewhat understandably, when a student gets a failing grade, they may respond with some version of, “I’m not getting what I paid for.” Very few of them would say that explicitly, but it’s sitting there in the space between us. Some have internalized a presumption that educating is an economic transaction, and it confuses the nature of something that really should remain at least to some extent independent of the money economy we inhabit.
There’s a lovely book—I think it was written in the sixties by Lewis Hyde—called The Gift. He talks about how one of the measures of an intact culture is that there needs to be a gift economy as well as a money economy. There need to be some things that you can’t commodify: they have to be gifts.
I think you can have deep conversations about capitalism and Christianity, which we don’t have time for here. But the money, the language of money economy, the language of the bottom line, the language of productivity, the “time equals money” equation—all of that—challenges what we’re trying to maintain. There is a widespread institutional tendency to move in a direction of thinking that declares, “If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t matter.”
But we know, as believers, that faith can’t be measured. It would be wrong to measure it or assess it in terms that we apply to a money economy.
MS: Utilitarianism has crept into too much of what is important.
MM: I think about finding the language for things like … oh, just to pull one word out: “radiance.” I think about experiencing people we would call radiant. You come into a room where they are and the energy is different. In the same way that some people impart peace, some people impart good cheer or liveliness or thoughtfulness. And I’d say that all of us have these sorts of energy fields around us. We emit something that we aren’t really aware of, and we can’t measure it.
But to go back to gathering, there’s something that each of us brings that contributes to the rich chemistry of being together, because we all carry and impart something that can’t be measured, or sometimes isn’t even addressed. I’ve taken a lot of interest in the fact that all of us inhabit energy fields. Energy medicine, which has been sidelined for a long time has now become a little more mainstream.
We’re beginning to rethink our earlier conceptions about things that we might at one time have consigned to mood swings or shifts in energy. We are beginning to ponder what’s happening simultaneously at psychic, spiritual, and physical levels. We have to acknowledge that something is happening that we can’t measure—something all of us exchange when we are in each other’s presence—even in cyberspace when we are all talking on Zoom.
I remember a year or so ago during the pandemic, at a Zoom gathering at the Glen Workshop. I was asked to do a contemplative centering prayer with people at the end of the day. It seemed like such an odd request! I thought, really? We’re going to do centering prayer where everybody is on Zoom?
JW & MS: [Laughter]
MM: At first it just seemed odd to me. We’re all going to sit in rooms, in our own houses, “being together” in centering prayer. Really? But I said I’d do it. And I suggested that, if possible, people light a candle where they were. I said a few words at the beginning, hit my little Tibetan bell, and we had half an hour of silence, sitting there on Zoom. Then I hit the bell again and thanked people, and we were done. At first I thought, this is embarrassingly odd. But then after one or two sessions I thought, this is lovely. After all, here we have all these people spread out all over the continent and beyond, gathering where they are to be in each other’s presence in cyberspace. It made me think about how intimately we are bound across time and space. And maybe also to think about entanglement, you know, where subatomic particles respond to each other at great distances. Anyway, I ended up feeling edified and instructed by the fact that we do have an effect on one another, even across time and space.
JW: I think one thing that was striking about COVID, and about having to live alone, is how people still found ways to creatively gather. I remember driving past a group of Langley farmers who’d sit outside our beloved Canadian coffee shop, Tim Horton’s, and they’d bring their lawn chairs and sit in a circle outside the coffee shop. They had been doing this for a while. It was amazing to see that creativity of gathering come together, and that is possibly because gathering is a need that just won’t go away.
MM: You’re right, and we’ve gotten very, as you say, “creative” about how to do that. I’m actually quite grateful for Zoom now. It puts us in touch with others with whom we share intimate dimensions of our lives and faith and to whom we would never have access if it all had to be in person.
MS: If somehow you were able to have the pastors of North America in a room, and they had to be smiling as they listened to you, what would you want to tell them?
MM: I like that question because I do have things that I would love to say if I had an opportunity, as I did recently, to speak to a room full of pastors. One thing I would say to them—and have often said to my husband who’s a retired Presbyterian minister—is to tell them that we support seminarians learning Greek and Hebrew and sometimes Aramaic and Ugaritic and the rest of the ancient languages because somebody needs to know those languages. If you have that gift, bring it on. Because I want to know if there’s a Greek or Hebrew word that opens up new dimensions of scripture. We want to hear about it!
One of my favorite sermons of my husband’s was about the word “opened” in the scene of Jesus’ baptism, where generally a translation of Mark 1:10 says something like, “and the heavens opened and a dove descended, and a voice came that said, ‘this is my beloved son.’” Well, the Greek word for opened there is actually an almost violent word, that might more accurately be translated as “ripped open.” The only other place that word occurs, as I understand it, is when the veil of the temple was torn on the day of the crucifixion. So, both times, it’s a moment of God’s breaking into history. It’s a rather shocking word. It allows for a whole new reading of that moment and what was happening and gives a sense of how the divine breaks into human history and life.
And so when someone has lifted out something from the ancient languages, they help remind us that we are working with a living Word that’s been through many translations and that the biblical material is kept alive in conversation. We have to trust that the spirit is guiding and working in those conversations.
There are seventy-five or more different English translations of the Bible. To hang on too tightly to any one of them is problematic. And I think we need an ordained ministry because there needs to be a critical mass of people among us who have taken the time to study the ancient texts and to know something about the currents of Christian history. We need to know why there are denominational divides and to be able to talk about the intersections of theology and politics. So I want pastors to remember what they have been given in trust so that they can offer it to us, because most of us don’t have access to it.
The other thing I would say to pastors is this: don’t dumb the sermons down. I mean, I understand that the pulpit is not a classroom and a sermon isn’t a Bible study, but I do think that pastors can lift us up into a place of curiosity and understanding, rather than somehow trying to make the sermon so user-friendly and accessible so that we go home with not much more to reflect on than we brought in. I know that may sounds a bit snobbish, but sometimes I think, you folks studied this stuff, so hand it over. Those are two things I would say to pastors.
Additionally, “Craft your words.” That doesn’t mean everyone has to write out a sermon, yet I have so appreciated sermons that are carefully prepared. Doing that allows for the listeners to linger over the key words and be reflective about them in ways that are difficult if the pastor hasn’t really paid attention to their own sentences.
JW: You mentioned that your teaching medical humanities included poetry. I wonder if there’s a way to teach poetry to prospective pastors and teachers.
MM: There is. I think a lot of seminaries now have at least occasional courses in poetry and prayer. I have taught that course a couple of times in different seminary settings. I wrote a book on poetry and prayer, called When Poets Pray, partly because I’m convinced that poetry, as such, doesn’t have to be religious or spiritual. Poetry takes us to the threshold of prayer, just in the way it engages us with the word itself and with the power of the word to shape feeling and thought. So, yes, I think it’s a very important part of pastoral education.
I have heard that a lot of people who do ministry as a second career, for some weird reason, are engineers. And I think, well, bless their hearts. That’s good, they have skills, but somebody needs to also make them read some poems.
JW & MS: [Laughter]
JW: You mentioned that poems are like prayer, or that they elevate us into that state of prayer. I’m wondering which poems those would be for you?
MM: Well, some of them are surprising. They are not all, as I said, religious poetry, though I do love Gerard Manley Hopkins. Everyone I know who knows Hopkins loves “God’s Grandeur” and “Pied Beauty.” I also love “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.” It’s a difficult poem, but that’s the one that has the lines at the end that I mentioned earlier: “Christ plays in ten thousand places.”
And there’s another challenging poem of his that ends with lines that always move me, about how we will find that we are like an “immortal diamond.” The phrase immortal diamond has great resonance for me because of that poem. I also love Jane Kenyon’s poem, “Let Evening Come.” I was a hospice volunteer for some years, and it is a poem about the coming of death. A number of the lines in it start with the word “let.” “Let evening come” is the refrain. I think just to pause over the word let, and remember all the way back to “let there be light,” is to see what a powerful word it is in the way it both allows and commands.
I have lots of favorite poems—certainly some of Shakespeare’s sonnets and a few of Emily Dickinson’s poems. But then there are some surprising ones along the way that I’ve just come upon and thought, that woke me up. I recommend Lynn Ungar, for instance, who’s a Unitarian Universalist minister. She’s written some very thought provoking, lively poems. I taught one of them recently that starts with the line “Consider the lilies of the field.” Then the whole poem is about camas lilies, and what they have been used for, and how they’re both useful and beautiful. It’s a lovely poem. And the very last line is “Yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” So the whole poem is bracketed by Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount. And that creates such a powerful context for looking at this flower.
Lots of good poems out there.
MS: Well, thank you so very much for all this, for your time and spirit. This was most enjoyable.
JW: Thank you.
MM: Thank you both.