Good morning,

Hope everything is great with you. I have a literary Fem Friday for you this morning, which is also about grace and giving of yourself. Some really super things in here and I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

Do you remember Maggie Smith’s poem “Good Bones”, from everywhere on the internet and also, some months after it went viral, Fem Friday? Here another poem of hers, which I also loved immediately on reading it:

Heart

A child of, say, six knows you’re not the shape

she’s learned to make by drawing half along a fold,

cutting, then opening. Where do you open?

Where do you carry your dead? There’s no locket

for that—hinged, hanging on a chain that greens

your throat. And the dead inside you, don’t you

hear them breathing? You must have a hole

they can press their gray lips to. If you open—

when you open—will we find them folded inside?

In what shape? I mean what cut shape is made

whole by opening? I mean besides the heart.

Maggie Smith (2017)

http://www.tinderboxpoetry.com/heart

As a fun bonus, have an interview with its poet, Maggie Smith, from a while ago. Remember, if you’re relying on Fem Friday for current news, it’ll be about three years before you find out that the Lusitania sank:

I submitted poems to my high school literary magazine, but I never had one accepted. I wish I’d known then that I’d still be writing twenty-some years later.

https://wordmothers.com/2015/03/24/interview-with-poet-maggie-smith/

And now, here is an actual Grace – Grace Warrick, who translated Mother Julian of Norwich’s “Revelations Of Divine Love” from medieval to modern English. Very little is known about Grace in general; she was a suffragette, she was Scottish, she had a sister – and even less is known about why she translated a then extremely obscure work, with apparently no prior interest in or aptitude for medieval English. She is the reason why we can read and enjoy and learn from the Revelations now, so whatever her motivations are I am grateful to her for  bringing this book to a modern audience.

https://thefreelancehistorywriter.com/2014/02/14/julian-of-norwich-mystic-theologian-and-anchoress/

Her sister commissioned a stained glass window to be dedicated to Grace in St Andrew’s Martyr’s Kirk. Might be a nice weekend trip for you if you live in Scotland, but if you are not so fortunate here is a photograph:

RELATED: did you know that there are YouTube tours of the stained glass in churches? This is very soothing! I might make a playlist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULbop6y8RUo

Finally, bringing together the themes of bodies and grace and giving, enjoy this sermon given by Charles Ledbetter, trans* activist, preached on Ascension Sunday at my local church. I’m sad not to have been there to hear it in person but happy to be able to read it on gdocs and share it with you:

I listened to a radio programme of trainee morticians, who practiced their craft with the spiritual enthusiasm of trainee priests. When asked how they imagined their funerals, one said she wanted her body to be left on a mountaintop and for its pieces to be carried by vultures to far-flung places. And I thought—yeah, that is the ascension of the body. Not that we are hermetically embalmed, or perfected, or even reducible to the meanings we ourselves inscribe in our own bodies—The point between the yes and the no is that we hold our bodies lightly. That at the same time as we must acknowledge that we are this matter, that “THIS is my body”—there is also the generous and abundant letting go that opens-out to a beautiful and infinite universe.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/176ph9iHOG89pZPiK8-xlgzRwuQzVFpzzvdiWiB85vG4/

Have a great weekend, team,

Alex.