Monday, January 14, 2008

The Little Towns of Bethlehem

I don't yet have the skills to reproduce this WITH the typographical spacing, which is quite important to the total effect, so I'll just post a link instead.


This was the poem that I read in lieu of sermon at the late service Christmas Eve. You can read it here.

5 comments:

spookyrach said...

sorry to comment off topic, but:

no, I've never heard of the Stone Angel. Tell me about it!

Crimson Rambler said...

Oh spooky, you are SO in for a treat. Margaret Laurence was a Manitoba girl who started out writing magazine fiction, stories set in Africa emerging into independence (she lived there with her husband, a consulting engineer); eventually she wrote short stories and novels about Canadian (often Canadian PRAIRIE) experience...The Stone Angel, The Fire-Dwellers, The Diviners... the stone angel is a figure in the cemetery...and a lot more...in the novel by that name. I think you'd like it. If you're interested but have trouble finding the novel, let me know?

Jim said...

That is good. And a better sermon than most of us got on 24 Dec 07, I think.

It resonates, I suspect, in direct proportion to the number of those little Towns-That-God-Gave-Cain one is familiar with.

Crimson Rambler said...

Well I realized that everybody was listening, most intently, for a place that they knew! And then they told me ALL about them, at the door: "My Dad was born in Flin Flon!" "We've BEEN in Atawapiskat!" "Oh boy, Cocrane, and Hearst... that old road..." Great fun and the theology's good too. It's the poetic equivalent of one of William Kurelek's Canadian nativity paintings.

suzanne said...

oh, this is so lovely--a litany of all places, all people- the univeral and the particular both present in those beautiful names (and most of them quite exotic and unpronounceble to this American midwesterner)! I am very glad to know about this poem and this poet.