I’ve enjoyed posting poetry series themed around the Christian year in the past couple of years (see “Poetry for Lent” and “Poetry for Easter“). I will continue that with a series called “Poetry for Ordinary Time.” Ordinary time includes two sections of the church year between Christmastide and Lent and Easter and Advent. The word “ordinary” here derives from the word ordinal by which the weeks are counted. Still, ordinary time does serve an opportunity to embrace the ordinary spaces and places of our lives, and the themes of the poems will express this.

Here is Malcolm Guite’s poem “A Sonnet for All Saints Day.” This sonnet is taken from Guite’s book Sounding the Seasons: Seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year. Malcolm Guite is an Anglican priest, poet, and songwriter, who is a Life Fellow and former chaplain of Girton College, Cambridge.

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Though Satan breaks our dark glass into shards
Each shard still shines with Christ’s reflected light,
It glances from the eyes, kindles the words
Of all his unknown saints. The dark is bright
With quiet lives and steady lights undimmed,
The witness of the ones we shunned and shamed.
Plain in our sight and far beyond our seeing
He weaves them with us in the web of being
They stand beside us even as we grieve,
The lone and left behind whom no one claimed,
Unnumbered multitudes, he lifts above
The shadow of the gibbet and the grave,
To triumph where all saints are known and named;
The gathered glories of His wounded love.

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Previous poems in this series:

• C. S. Lewis, “Evensong”
• Tomas Tranströmer, “Open and Closed Spaces”
• James Weldon Johnson, “The Creation”
• Denise Levertov, “Living”
• Wang Wei, “Morning, Sailing into Xinyang”
• Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Pied Beauty”
• Mary Oliver, “The Kingfisher”
• Osip Mandelstam, “Consider the River”
• Kwame Dawes, “Peach Picking”
• Anna Kamieńska, “A Prayer That Will Be Answered”
• Judah al-Harizi, “The Sun”
• Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things”
• Tu Fu, “Clear After Rain”
• John Milton, “On His Blindness”
• Rainer Maria Rilke, “It’s Possible”
• St. John of the Cross, “Living Flame of Love”
• Jacqueline Osherow, “Autumn Psalm”
• Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Spring and Fall”
• Marilyn Nelson, “How I Discovered Poetry”
• T. S. Eliot, excerpt from Choruses from ‘The Rock’, II
• Luci Shaw, “Arrangement in Space and Time”